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

Re:Jeremy Allison on Samba 4

[node 3]

There's a very interesting quote at the end of that article:

"Let's be honest, we don't really care about selling it, we're just having fun doing it. So long as we're having fun and we're working on problems that interest us then other people can worry about market share and how you sell it to the government or whoever, because that's the stuff that interests them."

If you think about it for a minute, if you consider how Open Source functions, where people work on the things that interest them, the "suits" that are often derided from some quarters are just filling a non-technical need in the Open Source community. There are often calls for people to test, write manuals, and create artwork as something they can do if they aren't programmers, but perhaps "marketing, sales, build corporations" are things that also should be added to that list?

To clarify, I'm certainly not talking about the CherryOS-style GPL-theives, but honest and earnest businesspeople (even though their motives may be primarily cash, they still must abide by proper Open Source rules).

Anyway, thought it was interesting.

Which version of Active Directory?

[j-cloth]

This all sounds great, but will it work when(if) Vista comes out? Previously, I had samba setups running beautifully on Win2K networks. Then 2003 came out and it messed it all up. Eventually Samba (and supporting docs) caught up and 2003 now works reasonably well. So will Samba 4 come out with great support for 2003 then break as soon as Vista is released?