path: root/WHATSNEW4.txt

What's new in Samba 4 alpha13
=============================

Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being
developed in parallel to the stable 3.x series. The main emphasis in
this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used
by Windows 2000 and above.

Samba4 alpha13 follows on from the alpha release series we have been
publishing since September 2007. Since this file has referred to alpha 12
for a while before any release happened and since Debian packages
have been published that presumed the existance of a alpha12 release
we are skipping alpha12 and going straight to alpha13.

WARNINGS
========

Samba4 alpha13 is not a final Samba release.  That is more a reference
to Samba4's lack of the features we expect you will need than a
statement of code quality, but clearly it hasn't seen a broad
deployment yet.  If you were to upgrade Samba3 (or indeed Windows) to
Samba4, you would find many things work, but that other key features
you may have relied on simply are not there yet.

For example, while Samba 3 is an excellent member of a Active
Directory domain, Samba4 is happier as a domain controller, and it is
in this role where it has seen deployment into production.

Samba4 is subjected to an awesome battery of tests on an
automated basis, we have found Samba4 to be very stable in it's
behaviour.  We have to recommend against upgrading production servers
from Samba 3 to Samba 4 at this stage, because there may be the features on
which you may rely that are not present, or the mapping of
your configuration and user database may not be complete.

If you are upgrading, or looking to develop, test or deploy Samba4, you should
backup all configuration and data.

NEW FEATURES
============

Samba4 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.

Our Domain Controller (DC) implementation includes our own built-in
LDAP server and Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) as well as the
Samba3-like logon services provided over CIFS.  We correctly generate
the infamous Kerberos PAC, and include it with the Kerberos tickets we
issue.

The new VFS features in Samba 4 adapts the filesystem on the server to
match the Windows client semantics, allowing Samba 4 to better match
windows behaviour and application expectations.  This includes file
annotation information (in streams) and NT ACLs in particular.  The
VFS is backed with an extensive automated test suite.

A new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing
Python programs to interface to Samba's internals.

The Samba 4 architecture is based around an LDAP-like database that
can use a range of modular backends.  One of the backends supports
standards compliant LDAP servers (including OpenLDAP), and we are
working on modules to map between AD-like behaviours and this backend.
We are aiming for Samba 4 to be powerful frontend to large
directories.

CHANGES SINCE alpha11
=====================

We have continued our commitment to provide a full DRS implementation for our
AD implementation and therefore achieved also this time big steps forward.

Our progress on DRS is being tracked in the Samba wiki:
http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba4_DRS_TODO_List

Beside this the release includes (among a lot of other things):

* a new build system based on WAF
Andrew Tridgell (tridge) invested much time to bring this up. He achieved a
marvellous work which brings us faster building, easier management and smaller
binaries.

* enhancements in Samba4 winbind to provide a fairly good implementation of the
most important functions needed by "libnss_winbind" and "pam_winbind"
This two components allow a user/group mapping for Windows accounts on UNIX and
UNIX-like systems. Therefore also these accounts can be used to connect to
services as "ssh", "login", "Xsession" and so on.
More informations available at http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba4/Winbind
and for winbind in general, "libnss_winbind" and "pam_winbind" in the Samba 3.X
documentation.

* server side NT ACLs manipulation
These can now also be set on the command line directly on the server. See
"net acl" for further informations.

* dynamic DNS updates
Up-to-date DNS entries are essential for Active Directory deployments. As for
the moment Samba4 isn't yet capable to interoperate with Microsofts AD DNS
server (regarding RPCs, ADs zone entries...) a kind of update script has been
developed. It also permits the update of the "grant" and "resource" lists.

* registry improvements
The registry code was reworked, improved and retested. This was achieved by the
new torture tests written by gd and some additional testing against Windows
("regedit" - Windows Registry Editor and "regedt32" - Windows NT Registry Editor).
Also some real bugs were fixed.

* new Kerberos HEIMDAL release
Andrew Bartlett (abartlet) imported a new release with various bugfixes

* DCE/RPC code unification work
Stefan Metzmacher (metze) started his work to unify these codebases between s3
and s4

* And much more
We always try to fix bugs and keep improving the (source) quality of our
program.

CHANGES
=======

Those familiar with Samba 3 can find a list of user-visible changes
since that release series in the NEWS file.

KNOWN ISSUES
============

- Domain member support is in it's infancy, and is not comparable to
  the support found in Samba3.

- There is no printing support in the current release.

- There is no NetBIOS browsing support in the current release

- The Samba4 port of the CTDB clustering support is not yet complete

- Clock Synchronisation is critical.  Many 'wrong password' errors are
  actually due to Kerberos objecting to a clock skew between client
  and server.  (The NTP work in the previous alphas are partly to assist
  with this problem).

- The DRS replication code often fails, and is very new

- Users upgrading existing databases to Samba4 should carefully
  consult upgrading-samba4.txt.  We have made a number of changes in
  this release that should make it easier to upgrade in future.
  Btw: there exists also a script under the "setup" directory of the
  source distribution called "upgrade_from_s3" which should allow a step-up
  from Samba3 to Samba4. It's not included yet in the binary distributions
  since it's completely experimental!

RUNNING Samba4
==============

A short guide to setting up Samba 4 can be found in the howto.txt file
in root of the tarball.

DEVELOPMENT and FEEDBACK
========================

We need your help! Projects as Samba 4 live from the community feedback. If you
provide expressive bug reports, some documentation snippets on the wiki or some
real code patches - all is appreciated if it meets our quality criterias. Here
you can find further references:

Bugs can be filed at https://bugzilla.samba.org/ but please be aware
that many features are simply not expected to work at this stage.

The Samba Wiki at http://wiki.samba.org should detail some of these
development plans.

Development and general discussion about Samba 4 happens mainly on
the #samba-technical IRC channel (on irc.freenode.net) and
the samba-technical mailing list (see http://lists.samba.org/ for
details).