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Samba 3.0.0RC1 Released
dook43 writes "Samba 3.0.0 RC1 has been released as of 8/16. Probably the most important new feature is its Active Directory support, but the rest of the new features can be found at the website."
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Having the Active Directory support is really a bug feature, as I had real big problems with authenticating a Linux Client in an AD server .. I hope that this issue will be solved in Samba 3 ..
Way to Go Samba!
I've been checking out a win2003 AD install for a client lately. A fairly fast workstation(2.4ghz) The creating of SID's thingy is soooo slow. My feeling is that the whole Active Directory is not mature yet.
my social life is pretty much in
I've installed the "unstable" samba 3.0RC1 packages under my Debian 2.4.20 system and I have to say, it works pretty well.
I've only experienced a few cases of "lock outs" of all clients, the first time because the init script didden't sucessfully kill all smbd's before starting new ones and the second time... Who knows, a restart of it helped fine anyway.
Other than that it seems pretty good for me with W98/W2K/XP Pro clients using different laguages, except for some random slowdowns in access to it but nothing major.
Also, that build is compiled with GCC-3.3 if anyone's interested in that.
Since some versions of Windows acting as an SMB server actually limit the number of allowed connections (that's Microsoft's Licensing for you), a Windows port of Samba actually wouldn't be that crazy of an idea for certain configurations.
Doesn't the creation of Linux tools for interfacing with Windows just further validate a needlessly Microsoftian System?
You don't have to install it Richard. For those of us with jobs to do however, this is a big step forward.
NFS is fine and all, but its limited to really unixy networking.
That said Active directory actively puzzles me (as does LDAP). I guess its back to the books again. I guess my windoze knowledge never did advance much beyond NT4.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I think you're trolling, but I'll answer anyway. First of all, Active Directory is a Microsoft-specific directory services protocol, it's not an open specification that the Samba folks can go and download and implement. If it weren't for the Samba people, your only option would have been to purchase Windows 2000/03 Server for Active Directory support.
Furthermore, you've clearly never reverse-engineered a protocol before. Since Microsoft doesn't release specifications for Active Directory interactions, the Samba team has to pretty much capture thousands of packets as a workstation logs in, then logs out, then logs in, then logs out, etc. and stare at the data for weeks or months to figure out how to emulate the AD logon. And then they have to do this for domain discovery, resource sharing, and all the other operations that AD supports. To do this for an entire suite of functionality can take years.
Frankly, I'm surprised and pleased that they've managed to build the excellent support they have for MS' network protocols, and I think the Samba team deserves some congratulations. Thanks and keep up the good work!
pGina does essentially what you describe. It replace GINA and allows MS boxes to authenticate directly against an LDAPv3 server. But people who understand this stuff much better than myself tell me that this is not really a great solution. GINA is a fairly superficial authentication component, and replacing it doesn't make some of the more subtle bits fit together. Modifying the LSA (Local Security Authority) would be necessary to do the job properly. But, not surprisingly, documentation for it is not forthcoming.