-'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 alpha2
+============================
+
+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 alpha2 follows on from our first alpha release, made in
+September, and the Technology Preview series we have offered for some
+time now.
+
+WARNINGS
+========
+
+Samba4 alpha2 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 Alpha 1
+=====================
+
+In the time since Samba4 Alpha1 was released in September 2007, Samba has
+continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas:
+
+ MMC Support: The Active Directory Users and Computers console now
+ handles group membership correctly.
+
+ member/memberOf: These and other linked attributes are now kept in
+ sync
+
+ subtree renames: Renaming a subtree of LDAP objects is now possible,
+ with all linked attributes being kept consistant.
+
+ Python Bindings: Bindings for a future move to Python as the
+ internal scripting language have been created.
+
+ Shared library use: In support of projects such as OpenChange,
+ which depend on Samba4, more of Samba4 is built as shared libraries.
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.
+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 / ira / wip.git / blobdiff