-The Samba Team is proud to present our first alpha release of Samba4.
+What's new in Samba 4 alpha4
+============================
-Samba4 aims to be a compatible replacement for
+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.
-In the time since TP5 was released in June 2007, Samba has
+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 alpha4 follows on from the alpha release series we have been
+publishing since September last year.
+
+WARNINGS
+========
+
+Samba4 alpha4 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 Alpha3
+=====================
+
+In the time since Samba4 Alpha2 was released in December 2007, Samba has
continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas:
- Group Policy Support: Basic group policies may be defined, and are
- enforced by Windows clients
+ Python Bindings: Bindings for Python are now used for all internal
+ scripting, and the system python installation is used to run all
+ Samba python scripts (in place of smbpython found in the previous
+ alpha).
+
+ As such Python is no longer optional, and configure will generate an
+ error if it cannot locate an appropriate Python installation.
+
+ 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.
- MMC Support: The Active Directory Users and Computers console now
- works, supporting most operations.
+ Registry: Samba4's registry library has continued to improve.
- Winbind: Kai Blin has been working hard on his Google Summer of
- Code project, creating a winbind implementation for Samba4.
+ ID mapping: Samba4 uses the internal ID mapping in winbind for all
+ but a few core users. Samba users should not appear in /etc/passwd,
+ as Samba will generate new user and group IDs regradless.
- Heimdal update: A Heimdal 1.0 snapshot is now included as the
- internal Kerberos library in Samba4.
+ NTP: Samba4 can act as a signing server for the ntp.org NTP deamon,
+ allowing NTPd to reply using Microsoft's non-standard signing
+ scheme. A patch to make NTPd talk to Samba for this purpose has
+ been submitted to the ntp.org project.
- In the past few weeks, many small but significant bugs have been
- fixed, particularly thanks to Matthias Dieter Wallnöfer <mwallnoefer@yahoo.de>
+ CLDAP: Users should experience less arbitary delays and more success with
+ group policy, domain joins and logons due to an improved
+ implementation of CLDAP and the 'netlogon' mailslot datagrams.
+
+ SMB2: The Samba4 SMB2 server and testsuite have been greatly
+ improved, but the SMB2 server remains off by default.
+
+ Secure DNS update: Configuration for GSS-TSIG updates of DNS records
+ is now generated by the provision script.
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.
+
+- 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 is partly to assist with this problem).
+
+- Samba4 alpha4 is currently only portable to recent Linux
+ distributions. Work to return support for other Unix varients is
+ expected during the next alpha cycle
+
+- Samba4 alpha4 is incompatible with GnuTLS 2.0, found in Fedora 9 and
+ recent Ubuntu releases. Please remove the
+ gnutls-devel/libgnutls-dev package before compiling (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).
git.samba.org / kai / samba.git / blobdiff