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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.
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!