Samba Team member Andrew Bartlett explores the world of Samba4, its development status, what you can (and can’t) do with Samba4, and — most importantly– when you can expect to start using Samba4 in a production environment.
Ever wanted to run an Active Directory Domain Controller on your Linux server? Did you run a Samba 3.0 DC, but had to move to Active Directory, or worried you might need to? Interested in the leading edge of Samba development, and wondering what the preceding questions mean?
Without Samba, Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers could not share files and printers with each other, and networks of windows computers could only use Microsoft’s products to implement consistent user names and passwords across an organisation, something known as domain control.
Since Samba was last covered by Linux Magazine in 2002, it seems the whole world has changed. Yet for members of the Samba Team the task remains to provide the Free Software community with a solid implementation of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol, and with that a bridge into the Windows world.
It is in that pursuit of interoperability that the Samba Team has continued, soon (at the time of writing) releasing version 3.2.0 of Samba, and alpha releases of Samba4.
But Samba4 is more than just a new version of Samba, and more akin to a new development effort. Largely rewritten to handle the problems of interacting with modern versions of Microsoft’s Windows suite, Samba4 has been a storehouse of testing and innovation. Samba4’s focus on test-driven development has bolstered the Samba Team’s production releases with comprehensive test-suites, and the demonstration and back-porting of new technologies has brought new life to the Samba 3.2 code base.
But…
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