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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.'"
Meh. Sun had CIFS in the Solaris kernel 5 years ago.
Why not? It's a new major version which provides new functionality, and is written in python to make it easier for people to contribute.
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.
Otherwise upgrade your hardware and move to Samba 4 when it becomes stable.
It *WILL* be slower and it *WILL* use more memory, since it's not stable and it's a major new version with new features.
Sheesh.
Isn't this the same critic that people made of Windows and compulsory hardware upgrades for a good decade ?
So now Linux is as bad as Windows. Way to go guys !!!!
Instead of leveraging C and C++ for performance reasons we're going backwards at an alarming rate.
What's next ? Porting the linux kernel to python ? Great Scott.
What about the other users on the same computer who are also using software which is running 100x slower than it could, just because Python (or whatever) is the new hotness?
On a machine that's actually, you know, doing work, cycles count. Hell, even on a single-user netbook or tablet, cycles count, since it negatively influences both heat generation and battery life -- even if it's "fast enough" for a human's interaction.
Intentional (or even incidental) inefficiency is never a positive thing when it comes to computing.
Kid-proof tablet..