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What's new in Samba 4 alpha4
============================
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.
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:
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.
Registry: Samba4's registry library has continued to improve.
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.
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.
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 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
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).
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