-'Samba4 TP4' presents you with an opportunity to see a Technology
-Preview (TP) snapshot of Samba4's development, as at January 2007.
-
-In the last few months since TP3 was released in October 2006,
-significant work has been done across many parts of Samba4. Since that
-time, we have added the basis for some new and exciting features:
-
- PKINIT support to Samba4's KDC will allow, smart-card login to a
- Samba4 domain. TP4 demonstrates this with static key files, but
- work will continue to enable actual hardware cards.
-
- Clustering support was always a design goal of Samba4, and with TP4
- we have the ctdb framework, a cluster-aware shared database. This
- allows Samba4 to share a shared cluster file-system with it's clients.
- Presented at this year's linux.conf.au, including a highly rigged
- demo, you can expect to see this mature over the next few months.
-
- Non-blocking and Asynchronous IO support, has always been a design
- goal in Samba4, and TP4 will use new Linux Kernel features to
- implement event driven asynchronous IO. This makes Samba more
- efficient on systems where some data may be 'further away' than a
- local disk, such as HSM systems. This allows the Kernel to handle
- reading the returned data from the disk, only notifying Samba when
- the data is ready for dispatch to the client.
-
- Our web-management console, known as SWAT, is being revamped, and in
- TP4 you can find a new Web 2.0 style user interface, being used to
- support a web-based ldb browser. We hope this new system will allow
- things simple not possible with the form-submit style of web
- management.
-
- Using LDB LDAP back-end integration has improved in this release, with an
- improved mapping module allowing the start of Fedora DS back-end
- support.
-
-In continuing our research effort, TP4 includes the work to better
-understand and implement the DRSUAPI replication protocols. By better
-understanding the needs of replication now, we can structure our
-databases so that their format will have to change less in future.
-
-We hope to use this replication function to replace the SamSync based
-Vampire process so effectively demonstrated since TP1, and to
-eventually join an Active Directory domain, as a replicating partner.
-
-Behind the scenes, much of the core infrastructure of Samba4 continues
-development:
-
- In Kerberos, we have continued to track the development of the
- Heimdal Kerberos implementation, and reduce the custom diff between
- our branch and upstream. Heimdal now provides plug-in APIs for
- almost all of the hooks we need, including management and validation
- of the PAC.
-
- In testing, our test infrastructure has undergone a quiet
- revolution, as we improve our unit test framework. Likewise, the
- tests themselves have continued to expand, as we follow our
- test-driven development pattern.
-
- In providing an abstraction above our raw RPC layer, the libnet
- library continues to expand, becoming a C and JS management API for
- Samba4 and remote servers.
-
- To ensure that, as an administrator and developer, you can easily
- read and edit our internal databases, our LDB layer has been
- optimised for speed. The aim here is to avoid needing to use the faster, but
- more opaque, TDB layer.
+What's new in Samba 4 alpha3
+============================
+
+Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being
+developed in parallel to the stable 3.0 series. The main emphasis in
+this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used
+by Windows 2000 and above.
+
+Samba 4 is currently not yet in a state where it is usable in
+production environments. Note the WARNINGS below, and the STATUS file,
+which aims to document what should and should not work.
+
+Samba4 alpha3 follows on from our second alpha release (made in
+December), the first alpha release (made in September), and the
+Technology Preview series we have offered for some time now.
+
+WARNINGS
+========
+
+Samba4 alpha3 is not a final Samba release. That is more a reference
+to Samba4's lack of the features we expect you will need than a
+statement of code quality, but clearly it hasn't seen a broad
+deployment yet. If you were to upgrade Samba3 (or indeed Windows) to
+Samba4, you would find many things work, but that other key features
+you may have relied on simply are not there yet.
+
+For example, while Samba 3.0 is an excellent member of a Active
+Directory domain, Samba4 is happier as a domain controller: (This is
+where we have done most of the research and development).
+
+While Samba4 is subjected to an awesome battery of tests on an
+automated basis, and we have found Samba4 to be very stable in it's
+behaviour, we have to recommend against upgrading production servers
+from Samba 3 to Samba 4 at this stage. If you are upgrading an
+experimental server, or looking to develop and test Samba, you should
+backup all configuration and data.
+
+NEW FEATURES
+============
+
+Samba4 supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon environment
+used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain join
+and domain logon operations with these clients.
+
+Our Domain Controller (DC) implementation includes our own built-in
+LDAP server and Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) as well as the
+Samba3-like logon services provided over CIFS. We correctly generate
+the infamous Kerberos PAC, and include it with the Kerberos tickets we
+issue.
+
+The new VFS features in Samba 4 adapts the filesystem on the server to
+match the Windows client semantics, allowing Samba 4 to better match
+windows behaviour and application expectations. This includes file
+annotation information (in streams) and NT ACLs in particular. The
+VFS is backed with an extensive automated test suite.
+
+A new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing
+Python programs to interface to Samba's internals.
+
+The Samba 4 architecture is based around an LDAP-like database that
+can use a range of modular backends. One of the backends supports
+standards compliant LDAP servers (including OpenLDAP), and we are
+working on modules to map between AD-like behaviours and this backend.
+We are aiming for Samba 4 to be powerful frontend to large
+directories.
+
+CHANGES SINCE Alpha2
+=====================
+
+In the time since Samba4 Alpha2 was released in December 2007, Samba has
+continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas:
+
+ Python Bindings: Bindings for Python are now in place, and used for
+ Samba's provision script, slowly displacing EJS as the embedded
+ scripting language. With its increased use, Python is no longer
+ optional, and configure will generate an error if it cannot locate
+ an appropriate Python installation.
+
+ SWAT Disabled: Due to a lack of developer time and without a
+ long-term web developer to maintain it, the SWAT web UI has been
+ disabled.
+
+ Oplock support: Samba4's file server now supports oplocks
+
+ GNU Make: To try and simplfy our build system, we rely on GNU Make
+ to avoid autogenerating a massive single makefile.
+
+ Account Expiry: Samba4 now better handles installations over 30 days
+ old (thanks to our long-suffering testers for keeping installations
+ around that long!)
+
+ Registry: Samba4 registry interoperability has been improved in
+ both the client utilities and in the registry service exposed by
+ the Samba4 server itself.
+
+ Administrative Tools: Many enhancements have been made that allow
+ better integration with Windows administrative tools, especially
+ Active Directory Users and Computers.
+
+ ID mapping: Samba4 now handles ID mapping via winbind. The mappings
+ are stored in a central ldb that could be shared across multiple
+ machines using LDAP. Internal callers access this interface via a new
+ wbclient library.
These are just some of the highlights of the work done in the past few
-months. More details can be found in our SVN history.
+months. More details can be found in our GIT history.
+CHANGES
+=======
+
+Those familiar with Samba 3 can find a list of user-visible changes
+since that release series in the NEWS file.
+
+KNOWN ISSUES
+============
+
+- Domain member support is in it's infancy, and is not comparable to
+ the support found in Samba3.
+
+- There is no printing support in the current release.
+
+- The Samba4 port of the CTDB clustering support is not yet complete
+
+- Clock Synchronisation is critical. Many 'wrong password' errors are
+ actually due to Kerberos objecting to a clock skew between client
+ and server.
+
+
+RUNNING Samba4
+==============
+
+A short guide to setting up Samba 4 can be found in the howto.txt file
+in root of the tarball.
+
+DEVELOPMENT and FEEDBACK
+========================
+Bugs can be filed at https://bugzilla.samba.org/ but please be aware
+that many features are simply not expected to work at this stage.
+
+The Samba Wiki at http://wiki.samba.org should detail some of these
+development plans.
+
+Development and general discussion about Samba 4 happens mainly on
+the #samba-technical IRC channel (on irc.freenode.net) and
+the samba-technical mailing list (see http://lists.samba.org/ for
+details).
git.samba.org / samba.git / blobdiff