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

Jeremy Allison on Samba 4

[Anonymous Coward]

Came across this (short but interesting) interview with Jeremy Allison, one of the project's lead developers, where he talks about Samba 4:

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules.php?op=modloa d&name=News&file=article&sid=217

Any software that has a 'Susan Stage' has got to be cool :-)

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.

it's in Debian

[CAPSLOCK2000]

Debian allready has packages.
Install them by running:
aptitude install -t experimental samba

But you'll need to add an entry for experimental to /etc/apt/sources.list first.
If you don't know how to, you shouldn't be messing with experimental software anyway.

Samba 4

[YearOfTheDragon]

There has been info about Samba 4 for some time. Andrew Bartlett wrote a year ago an interesting thesis about Samba 4 and Active Directory (PDF).

But the release of this TP is good news, I hope that the use of Microsoft's Active Directory as an authentication service for Linux systems is coming to an end. All what we need now is a nice GUI.

Re:Just Work (TM)

[tpgp]

Security on a home netowrk doesn't really interest me.

I know - thats why I'm posting this from your home PC.

I'd like to be able to "just share" the files without setting up users etc, etc.

Just post your requirements here I'll set them up for you... after all I don't want your home net to be locked down ;-)

Seriously - just because you would like software to be shipped insecure (and easy) by default doesn't mean that it should be. Have a look at this guide - Samba-3: A Simple Anonymous Read-Write Server

Re:What is this samba you speak of?

[Spacelord]

I'm not a sysadmin, but I never got how NFS prevented a user plugging a computer which they have root access on into the network, mounting a common NFS mount, "su"ing to somebody's UID and then deleting their files. AFAICS, SMB handles this by requiring credentials of some kind from the computer. Can anyone explain this?

"Authentication" with NFS is IP based. You grant access to NFS mounts by specifying which hosts can mount that share. This implies that the hosts you allow are trusted, and that your network is trusted as well. So yes, if a computer you have root access to has been granted read/write access to an NFS mount then you can just su to someone else's UID and delete their files on that NFS mount.

Is it a good idea to use NFS in a security sensitive environment? Probably not.

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?