Samba 4 Technology Preview Released

daria42 writes "Samba creator Andrew Tridgell has officially released a technology preview of Samba 4 at the Linux.conf.au conference in New Zealand, ending a three-year wait for users. But wait before upgrading those servers. 'It may eat your cat,' says the Samba team in a statement, 'but is far more likely to choose to munch on your password database.'" From the article: "'Samba 4 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,' the group said in a statement on its Web site, noting this feature was 'the main emphasis' for the new software."

Comments

Just Work (TM)

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

But can I make an anonymous read/write share without performing invasive surery on config files. And can I then easily mount that share?

Samba is great as a home network share, but it's not a single click system. Security on a home netowrk doesn't really interest me. I'd like to be able to "just share" the files without setting up users etc, etc.

Re:Just Work (TM)

[mwood]

"[Samba is] not a single click system." Hooray for that. I'd love to be able to give the boot to these Windows servers with their sysadmin-hostile pointy-clicky interfaces and their million and one secret Registry keys that have no user interface at all. Go Samba Team!

Re:Only 6 years

[tpgp]

So, in 2006, Samba is finally able to do what windows was able in 2000?

Five years to reverse engineer a difficult, obfuscated protocol is quite frankly amazing.

And you see - they don't really have to offer full compatability immediately - but if they do it before win2k ends its lifecycle, SAMBA + *nix offers companies dependant on AD a way out without having to go the win2k3 route.

Way to innovate, OSS community!

Way to troll dJOEK!

There is virtually no innovation in software, proprietary or OSS - everyone is just copying everyone elses ideas & making incremental improvements...

I mean we're all using the same desktop paradigm from 30 years ago - and the only substatial innovation I've seen in that is overlapping windows (from maybe 25 years ago)

But as an Active Directory replacement?

[Money for Nothin']

Can it do authorization of group access to a given application? How about publishing network resources (printers, workstations, etc.)? Can Samba 4 replicate its data between multiple sites? Is Samba 4's AD functionality even built off any sort of LDAP technology to begin with (probably OpenLDAP, if anything)?

For all MSFT's faults (and there are many, as /. routinely points out), AD *is* a decent NOS directory...

Re:What is this samba you speak of?

[BenjyD]

That doesn't help when the root user creates a user account with the correct UID and then logs in as that user, does it?

Re:Jeremy Allison on Samba 4

[smittyoneeach]

where people work on the things that interest them

Let's not kid ourselves: this is the good news/bad news of FOSS.
The genius of proprietary software: getting you to trade your sovreignty for code that does a lot of the less interesting stuff.
Unless you're actually selling that printer, are you going to want to spend all day writing a driver for it, much less testing it against a bazillion OS's?

Re:Jeremy Allison on Samba 4

[Chemicalscum]

RMS started the Free Software Movement because he wanted to improve a printer driver for an early laser printer and they wouln't give him the source.