-What's new in Samba 4 alpha12
+What's new in Samba 4 alpha13
=============================
Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being
this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used
by Windows 2000 and above.
-Samba4 alpha11 follows on from the alpha release series we have been
-publishing since September 2007
+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 alpha12 is not a final Samba release. That is more a reference
+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
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.
+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.
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:
+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"
-The use of this two components allows 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.
+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.
"net acl" for further informations.
* dynamic DNS updates
-A new DNS upgrade mechanism has been introduced which works with newer bind9
-releases.
+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
Also some real bugs were fixed.
* new Kerberos HEIMDAL release
-Abartlet imported a new release with various bugfixes
+Andrew Bartlett (abartlet) imported a new release with various bugfixes
* DCE/RPC code unification work
-Metze started his work to unify these codebases between s3 and s4
+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
from Samba3 to Samba4. It's not included yet in the binary distributions
since it's completely experimental!
-- ACL are not set by default on shares created by the provision.
- Work is underway on this subject and it should be fixed soon.
-
RUNNING Samba4
==============
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 patches - all is appreciated if it meets our quality criterias. Here you
-can find the links:
+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.
+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.