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Samba 4 Enters Beta
rayk_sland writes "Progress is being made on the long awaited Samba 4 release. On Tuesday the Samba 4 team announced their first beta. Those of us who refuse to have a closed-source server at the core of our networks will be encouraged to see this milestone. Here are a few of the new features: 'Samba 4.0 beta 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. ... Samba 4.0 beta ships with two distinct file servers. We now use the file server from the Samba 3.x series 'smbd' for all file serving by default. For pure file server work, the binaries users would expect from that series (nmbd, winbindd, smbpasswd) continue to be available. Samba 4.0 also ships with the 'NTVFS' file server. This file server is what was used in all previous alpha releases of Samba 4.0, and is tuned to match the requirements of an AD domain controller. We continue to support this, not only to provide continuity to installations that have deployed it as part of an AD DC, but also as a running example of the NT-FSA architecture we expect to move smbd to in the longer term. ... Finally, a new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing Python programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python.'"
Way to school Microsoft on their own technology!
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Yeah.. but does printing work yet? :P It's been broken for what?
A decade?
At present, Slashdot is serving me an advertisment for "Dioralyte".
I'm just wondering why Slashdots customers think that an advertisment for a post-diarrhoea rehydration remedy is appropriate in this environment? Perhaps they think that the rollout of Samba 4 Beta will give Microsoft the shits?
really? god help us all.. I really hope this doesn't affect performance or memory footprint.
I've first tested Samba 4 around alpha 11. It was certainly an interesting learning experience and it was also surprisingly stable for an alpha product. I'd love to play around with it again after 2 years of development.
$(echo cm0gLXJmIC8= | base64 --decode)
Tridge is so super talented. Wish he had focused on rsync....
Under what licence is Samba 4 published ? Still the restrictive GPLv3 or they adopted a more permissive licence that won't scare the legal teams everywhere ?
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
luke howard implemented Active Directory, in XAD, and released a product in 2002 (bought recently by novell). he used samba, freedce, heimdal and openldap, providing patches for each that hooked in the services that he implemented.
what he *did not* do was implement an entire LDAP server from scratch, implement an entire DCE/RPC runtime from scratch, implement an entire kerberos server from scratch.
i spoke to someone who used to be a big supporter of samba and was a prominent and active member of the samba team, last year. when i was working on samba-tng, he had 20 customers. ten years later that number is down to THREE - all others have gone back to NT Domains on Windows. one of those three is honest enough to tell him that they HATE samba, with a vengeance. they are bitterly disappointed, and the only reason that they are still using samba is because they are forced to.
the work i did on samba-tng *would* have proceeded to Active Directory interoperability *if* the samba team had not been so hostile towards it. in essence the samba team leaders felt threatened by my abilities, and did not wish me to become the technical lead [by default]. they simply did not understand the scope or scale of the task, were unable to fully grasp it, and to some extent they still don't. twelve YEARS later we see the results of their decisions and actions. what can i say?
So, I guess our organisation is one of those strange ones that persists with Samba as a domain controller.
To date, we have around 400 machines (desktops and laptops) running mainly XP (but some with Windows 7 and with a full migration in progress to Windows 7). We run two separate Samba 3 DCs to service out two domains. This setup has served us well for almost 10 years now.
The main challenge presented to someone trying to run Windows Vista or above on computers attached to a Samba3 domain controller is the lack of group policy options. With XP and below, you can use the 'ntconfig.pol' method to deploy policies to workstations on the domain. With Vista (and Windows 7) this method is no longer supported (and I don't just mean 'not officially supported, but works with some hacks'- it actually does.not.work.at.all). There are ways around this, and I have managed to find a workable solution that will allow us to run Windows 7 exclusively on a Samba3 domain and still have basically the same policy options available to us (this is achieved by working on the local computer policy for non-administrator users on the master image of our standard operating environment, combined with manually mapping samba groups to certain local groups on the workstation). This obviously isn't perfect, but it works for us and saves us a heck of a lot of money compared to the alternative, but I appreciate that what works for us won't work for everyone.
So for me, the major feature that Samba4 brings to the table is the group policy side of things (I know there's obviously a lot more to it than that, but at present that is the major thing that feels 'missing' from Samba3). Given that I see no reason why we won't end up sticking with Windows 7 until it ends extended support (in 8 years time) I see no reason why we won't be using Samba for quite some time.
Oh, and other than congratulate the Samba4 team in general, I have to give a personal congrats to Andrew Bartlett- a fellow Aussie and someone I have met personally. Thanks for all your hard work guys!
I mean seriously ... who cares. If you are deploying an enterprise class infrastructure get yourself a couple Win2K8R2 VMs and move on. I loved Samba a decade ago ... it allowed me to avoid M$ products. These days Samba is just one big bug. I don't have the time nor energy to battle it.
SAMBA-nice, has its uses.
But if you want to do AD, do it with MS. Don't pretend that it can be done with SAMBA (at least not without pain). At the very least, SAMBA trades its own mad ranting about being interoperable while setting everything internally so its not.
And bottom line, the squeeling, crying and whining about MS interoperability never struck a cord at all with me. SAMBA came about because open source and its structures offered nothing that came close. If Novell and MS can offer a client and a back end server, it seems to me that Linux and open source could have providided a best of breed method of its own.
Instead, all I ever saw was that MS was evil and Linux and open source had to be given access to it. To my mind this was nothing much more than legally enforced theft of technology and I never thought it was right.
Several years later - and having had access to all they wanted, this is where we are?
Given the fuss kicked up, and the legal demands, I think MS should turn round and issue a counter case and state 'where is the interoperable product people put us through a legal case for?' You said we were the case of the failure of this in the market place, we complied and where is the product?
And no, don't get me wrong, I really like open source, and I like Samba and so on, but I never liked or thought that legal case had any merit, and I never thought open source really got its shit together in providing anything, it just seemed to want to steal someone else's work in this particular area.
We`re all equal
GPLv3 is very restrictive with respect to developers. It's fairly open from the perspective of a user.
I've tested alpha 16 and 18 and they are quite functional. I just wish they took the external LDAP route. Running on top of LDAP is good but being restricted to their own internal LDAP server isn't.
Right now if you check their wiki they discourage the use of an external LDAP server. So while they offer scripts to migrate your Samba 3.x LDAP based directory what should I do about the other applications using my directory server? Can I extend the schema? Their default setup doesn't even have the Posix schema attributed to nis.schema.
Just hope the tools that now allow slightly easier admin of Samba start looking at Samba4 now. Ok we are all CLI people at heart, but to move over the admins who just want to open AD tools and change a user, it would be useful.
This is a immense thing to appear and will help moving some offices over to not use M$ AD. Only problem is all the other tech that M$ pile on that you end up relying on. If its just AD and file, you are fine. But if you want to do Exchange, sharepoint and MS SQL, migration will definitely take longer! Not its impossible, there are some great alternatives, but just takes longer.
Memory and CPU have never been cheaper, if you're still running your samba box on a PIII 450MHz then you'll probably want to stay on Samba 3.
Please save this hackneyed retort for the Python programmers user group meetings.
Perhaps you missed the current and refreshing trend towards cheaper, fanless, low powered computing devices. Think embedded and NAS. Even if hardware is cheaper than it was, that doesn't mean we want to waste our money. But, more importantly, we don't want to suffer noise, heat, size or power consumption unnecessarily.
Your stock programmers mantra is not only wasteful, it is why we need a quad core 3Ghz with oodles of RAM to do the same work, in the same slow time, that we did 15 years ago with the 450Mhz PIII you cited.
SAMBA is a file server. A very basic function that should not require orders of magnitude increases in computing power with every iteration because of lazy programmers. The ultimate work output, sharing files and directory service, remains unchanged, so why must we make the software huge and slow?
I get that Work == Hard, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be done.
You have a funny definition of permissive that seems to include "has restrictions". The "most permissive license" would be one that imposed no use restrictions whatsoever-- which GPLv3 (and v2) does not qualify for.
You might say that its the "most free" or "most open" or "most consumer friendly", and possibly some might agree with you, but certainly not most permissive.
The decade-long focus on playing nice with Microsoft Windows seems to be getting somewhere, but I haven't seen much about letting Linux play too.
Does CIFS implement SMB2 yet (or is there an "SMB2FS" module that I missed), or is Linux still excluded outside of "smbclient"?
Can SAMBA4's LDAP server also be used for standard basic LDAP authentication as well "e.g. for web servers, minimalistic *nix boxen, etc) or does it still only permit authentication by clients implementing a full "ActiveDirectory®" stack?
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Whoo, you might want to have that ego inflammation lanced. I think it's starting to interfere with your vision.
Nothing to do with ego. Programmers are expensive.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You need to shop around more, then. Try Eastern Europe or your local high school, since wages are rising in India and China. Programmers are cheap; you just burn 'em up and then kick them out the door, like Cato the Elder said. They can work in the salt mines after you use up their youth and genius.
Remember, product quality is not an issue! PHBs aren't competent to recognize quality anywhere but the golf course, and their marketing plans don't depend on providing any actual value to customers anyway. Think of your customers as prey, to be cozened and schmoozed until you've sucked all the money from their flabby corpses, then you can discard them just like programmers.
Programming is about picking the right tool for the job (which is never Python, but I digress).
What faults do you find in Python? I would like to know.