'Samba4 TP5' presents you with a snapshot into Samba4's ongoing
development, as we move towards our first alpha releases.  This Technology
Preview (TP) is snapshot of Samba4's development, as at June 2007.

In the time since TP4 was released in January 2007, Samba has
continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas:

  Work has continued on SWAT, the the libnet API behind it.  These we
  hope will grow into a full web-based management solution for both
  local and remote Samba and windows servers.

  The DRSUAPI research effort has largely concluded, and an initial
  implementation of AD replication is present, included in torture
  test-cases.  This includes the decryption of the AD passwords, which
  were specially and separately encrypted.  This should be recognised
  as vital milestone.

  Likewise, the LDAP Backend project has moved from a research
  implementation into something that can be easily deployed outside
  the test infrastructure.  

  Testing has been an area of great work, with renewed vigour to
  increase our test coverage over the past few months.  In doing so,
  we now demonstrate PKINIT and many other aspects of kerberos, as
  well as command-line authentication handling in our testsuite.

  The testsuite infrastructure has been rewritten in perl and
  extended, to setup multiple environments: allowing testing of the
  domain member, as well as the domain controller, roles.  Samba4's
  initial implementation of winbind has been revived, to fill in these
  tests.

  In clustering, work on CTDB (an implementation of a clustered Samba)
  has moved ahead very well, but the current code has not
  been merged into Samba4 in time for this release.

  To support better management, we have investigated group policy
  support, and include the infrastructure required.  Unfortunately
  without MMC write support, you will need to place the polices into
  the directory by hand.  

As we move forward, we have many of the features we feel are required
for a Samba4 Alpha.  Similarly, we know enough about the data
formats (particularly those that are encrypted) to be confident that
we won't need to change the LDB format.  Our plan is to publish a
Samba4 alpha in the next few months. 

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.