Samba Packages for Enterprise Linuxes

Agh writes "German company SerNet (founded amongst others by Samba-Team member Volker Lendecke) has a portal for precompiled packages for Suse's and RedHat's Enterprise Distributions (x86 32 and 64bit, s390, and zSeries) as well as Debian sarge and woody: http://www.enterprisesamba.com/ (Heise story here: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/57389) Offered is always the newest stable version of Samba (currently 3.0.11)."

Comments

Latest versions perhaps?

[Mad Merlin]

The website is pretty sparse, and I don't read German very well, but I'd guess that the purpose of this site is provide the very latest stable version of Samba to enterprises that want to be on the bleeding edge, especially in critical software like Samba, which allows Linux and Windows to work together, but they can't afford to deal with the rough edges. I'm not sure how good Red Hat/Suse are about providing updates for Samba for their respective distributions, but I was under the impression that they only provide security updates within a particular version of that distribution, not entirely new versions. In this respect, this is good in that enterprise users can upgrade their respective versions of Samba (to a newer, also stable version) without moving to a newer distribution, though I would imagine it could also cause some problems in certifying software (like Oracle) for that particular distribution, as it means another permutation to test against.

Overall, choice is good, but I'm not sure how helpful this effort will be.

Re:Why is this necessary?

[Tsunayoshi]

I loaded a RH Enterprise 3.0 Update 4 fully patched system about 2 weeks ago, and samba was only on 3.0.9 patch something. Red Hat usually applies security fixes to older release code bases and just updates the patch number on their RPMs so as not to break their distributions with newer versions not thoroughly tested. Nothing is stopping you, however, from installing your own newer version of software is you so choose.

As another example, a few years ago Red Hat's OpenSSH version was at 3.1p1 when OpenSSH was releasing 3.5p1, but every security/bug fix between the 2 versions had been backported by Red Hat into 3.1p1.

RH's method is great for the sites that rely on straight vendor support for all patches and bug-fixes, but not for those sites who need new functionality only found in the current bleeding edge software versions.