What's new in Samba 4 alpha5 ============================ 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. Samba4 alpha5 follows on from the alpha release series we have been publishing since September 2007 WARNINGS ======== Samba4 alpha5 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, and it is in this role where it has seen deployment into production. Samba4 is subjected to an awesome battery of tests on an automated basis, 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, because there may be the features on which you may rely that are not present, or the mapping of your configuration and user database may not be complete. If you are upgrading, or looking to develop, test or deploy Samba4, 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 Alpha4 ===================== In the time since Samba4 Alpha4 was released in June 2008, Samba has continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas: LDAP backend support restored (issues preventing the use of the LDAP backend in alpha4 have been addressed). SMB2 Support: The SMB2 server, while still disabled, has improved, and now supports SMB2 signing. OpenChange support: Updates have been made since alpha4 to better support OpenChange's use of Samba4's libraries. Faster ldb loading: A fix to avoid calling 'init_module' (which was not defined by Samba modules, but was by the C library) will fix some of the slowness in authentication. SWAT Remains Disabled: Due to a lack of developer time and without a long-term web developer to maintain it, the SWAT web UI remains been disabled (and would need to be rewritten in python in any case). GNU Make: To try and simplfy our build system, we rely on GNU Make to avoid autogenerating a massive single makefile. These are just some of the highlights of the work done in the past few 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. - There is no NetBIOS browsing 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. (The NTP work in the previous alpha is partly to assist with this problem). - Samba4 alpha5 is currently only portable to recent Linux distributions. Work to return support for other Unix varients is expected during the next alpha cycle - Samba4 alpha5 is incompatible with GnuTLS 2.0, found in Fedora 9 and recent Ubuntu releases. GnuTLS use may be disabled using the --disable-gnutls argument to ./configure. (otherwise 'make test' and LDAPS operations will hang). 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).