-What's new in Samba 4 Technology Preview
-========================================
+'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 DRAUAPI 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.
-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.
-
-With 3 years of development under our belt since Tridge first proposed
-a new Virtual File System (VFS) layer for Samba3 (a project which
-eventually lead to our Active Directory efforts), it was felt that we
-should create something we could 'show off' to our users. This is a
-Technology Preview (TP), aimed at allowing users, managers and
-developers to see how we have progressed, and to invite feedback and
-support.
-
-WARNINGS
-========
-
-Samba4 TP is currently a pre-alpha technology. It may eat your cat, but
-is far more likely to choose to munch on your password database. We
-recommend against upgrading any production servers from Samba 3 to
-Samba 4 at this stage. If you are upgrading an experimental server,
-you should backup all configuration and data.
-
-We expect that format changes will require that the user database be
-rebuilt from scratch a number of times before we make a final release,
-losing password data each time.
-
-Samba 4 Technology Preview includes basic Access Control List (ACL)
-protection on the main user database, but due to time constraints,
-none on the registry at this stage. We also do not currently have
-ACLs on the SWAT web-based management tool. This means that Samba 4
-Technology Preview is not secure.
-
-File system access should occur as the logged in user, much as Samba3
-does.
-
-Again, we strongly recommend against use in a production environment
-at this stage.
-
-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.
-
-SWAT is now integrated into Samba 4 as the user-friendly interface to
-Samba server management. SWAT provides easy access to our
-setup and migration tools. Using SWAT, you can migrate windows
-domains in Samba 4, allowing easy setup of initial user databases, and
-upgrades from Samba 3.
-
-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
-JavaScript 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
-=======
-
-Those familiar with Samba 3 can find a list of user-visible changes
-since that release series in the NEWS file.
-
- - An optional password is no longer supported as the second argument to
- smbclient.
-
-KNOWN ISSUES
-============
-
-- Standalone server and domain member roles are not currently
- supported. While we have much of the infrastructure required, we
- have not collected these pieces together.
-
-- There is no printing support in the current release.
-
-- SWAT can be painful with <TAB> and forms. Just use the mouse, as
- the JavaScript layer doing this will change.
-
-- Domain logons (using Kerberos) from windows clients incorrectly
- state that the password expires today.
-
-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/. Please
-look at the STATUS file before filing a bug to see if a particular
-is supposed to work yet.
-
-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 / kai / samba.git / blobdiff