Getting to Samba 4

[ Thanks to Jeremy Allison for this link. ]

"When the Samba Team met at the CIFS conference this year, we had a meeting to put together a plan for shipping a production Samba 4 code-base. Here's how we think it might work.

"Currently, the Samba 3 file and print server and the Winbind identity mapping code are the backbone of the current Samba product. The Samba 3 Windows NT4 compatible Domain Controller works well, but is not as widely deployed as it used to be (there are few sites left that don't use Active Directory functionality).

"So in brief, the plan is to merge the Samba 3 file server and winbindd code with the current Samba 4 Active Directory code, to produce a product that contains a production file and print server, identity mapping service, and Active Directory compatible Domain Controller. The file server is now fully cluster aware, with complete Windows semantics and is currently being extended to include the new SMB2 protocol and full Windows ACL support.

"Obviously this will require quite a lot of merge work, but we believe this may be possible to achieve in 2010. The plan is to keep shipping updates to Samba 3 (the next release is 3.5.0, followed in six months by 3.6.0 and so on), whilst the merge work with the Samba 4 Active Directory code is done in the background. Once we feel we have a stable code-base we will release the merged code as the "production" Samba 4 tree."

Complete Story

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