What's new in Samba 4 alpha17 ============================= Samba 4.0 will be the next version of the Samba suite and incorporates all the technology found in both the Samba4 alpha series and the stable 3.x series. The primary additional features over Samba 3.6 are support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above. WARNINGS ======== Samba4 alpha17 is not a final Samba release, however we are now making good progress towards a Samba 4.0 release, of which this is a preview. Be aware the this release contains both the technology of Samba 3.6 (that you can reasonably expect to upgrade existing Samba 3.x releases to) and the AD domain controller work previously known as 'samba4'. While binaries for the stable file server are provided in this release, for a stable, supported file server, Samba3 domain or AD domain member installation, please run a Samba 3.x release, as we are still bedding down the new single build system. Samba4 is subjected to an awesome battery of tests on an automated basis, we have found Samba 4.0 to be very stable in it's behavior. However, we still recommend against upgrading production servers from Samba 3.x release to Samba 4.0 alpha at this stage. If you are upgrading, or looking to develop, test or deploy Samba 4.0 alpha releases, you should backup all configuration and data. NEW FEATURES ============ Samba 4.0 alpha 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. Samba 4.0 alpha ships with two distinct file servers. The file server from the Samba 3.x series is 'smbd', and works with the binaries users would expect from that series (nmbd, winbindd, smbpasswd). Samba 4.0 also ships with a new file server, which is tuned to match the requirements of an AD domain controller. Users should not use the file server in the 'samba' binary for non-DC related tasks. A new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python. CHANGES SINCE alpha16 ===================== For a list of changes since alpha 15, please see the git log. $ git clone git://git.samba.org/samba.git $ cd samba.git $ git log release-4-0-0alpha16..release-4-0-0alpha17 Some major user-visible changes include: samba-tool dbcheck ------------------ We now have an fsck-like tool for Samba's internal sam.ldb database. Run samba-tool dbcheck after installation to check your database for self-consistency. Any database created with a previous Samba4 alpha will have a very large number of consistency errors, which this tool can fix. See also the -H option to point dbcheck at a different database to the default, and the --fix and --yes options to make changes and to not prompt about those changes. After upgrading Samba, it is suggested that you do the following: - stop samba - take a backup copy of your sam.ldb and sam.ldb.d/* database files - run samba-tool dbcheck --cross-ncs --fix - use 'all' to say yes to fixing each type of error found - after it has finished, run dbcheck again to ensure it reports no errors There will be a lot of errors fixed, particularly related to bad/missing GUID values. This is due to a bug in previous releases that left many objects with bad GUID values. These can all be fixed using dbcheck with steps above. New default paths ----------------- The configure options for paths have changed again, and the --enable-fhs option has been reinstated. Packagers should attempt to first package Samba using: ./configure --enable-fhs --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var and only after examining the location Samba uses with these options should further changes be made. Existing packaging scripts are not expected to work unmodified, instead the Samba Team's aim is to simplify such scripts for the long term. samba-tool domain samba3upgrade ------------------------------- The new samba-tool domain samba3upgrade command is a supported upgrade route from Samba 3.x domain controllers to Samba 4.0 AD domain controllers. This provides a one-time migration of all users, domain members, passwords, groups, group members and account polcies. This tool is still under development and may fail when presented with an inconsistant Samba3 database (such as many LDAP configurations). We hope to improve the error handling and recovery in these situations, so please provide feedback using the samba-technical mailing list. KNOWN ISSUES ============ - Installation on systems without a system iconv (and developer headers at compile time) is known to cause errors when dealing with non-ASCII characters. - In some situations, group members may not be upgraded by the samba-tool domain upgrade_from_s3 script - The samba-tool domain join script will not join Windows 2000 domains. - Domain member support in the 'samba' binary is in it's infancy, and is not comparable to the support found in winbindd. As such, do not use the 'samba' binary (provided for the AD server) on a member server. - There is no printing support in the 'samba' binary (use smbd instead) - There is no NetBIOS browsing support (network neighbourhood) in the 'samba' binary (use nmbd and smbd instead) - 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 alphas are partly to assist with this problem). - The DRS replication code may fail. Please contact the team if you experience issues with DRS replication, as we have fixed many issues here in response to feedback from our production users. RUNNING Samba 4.0 as an AD DC ============================= A short guide to setting up Samba 4 as an AD DC can be found on the wiki: http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba4/HOWTO ####################################### Reporting bugs & Development Discussion ####################################### Please discuss this release on the samba-technical mailing list or by joining the #samba-technical IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. If you do report problems then please try to send high quality feedback. If you don't provide vital information to help us track down the problem then you will probably be ignored. All bug reports should be filed under the Samba 4.0 product in the project's Bugzilla database (https://bugzilla.samba.org/). ====================================================================== == Our Code, Our Bugs, Our Responsibility. == The Samba Team ======================================================================