Samba 3.0 alpha0 Released

[Warren Togami]

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-11-30-007-20-OS-SV

jra at samba.org Jeremy Allison writes: 


              WHATS NEW IN Samba 3.0 alpha0
              =============================

This is a pre-release of Samba 3.0 alpha0. This is NOT a stable
release. Use at your own risk.

The purpose of this alpha release is to get wider testing of the major
new pieces of code in the current Samba 3.0 development tree. We are
planning on ceasing development on the 2.2.x release of Samba very
shortly and after that we will be concentrating on Samba 3.0. To
reduce the time before the final Samba 3.0 release we need as many
poeple as possible to start testing these alpha releases, and
hopefully giving us some high quality feedback on what needs fixing.

Note that Samba 3.0 is not anywhere near feature complete yet. There
is a lot more coding we have planned, but unless we get what we have
done already more widely tested we will have a hard time doing a
stable release in a reasonable time frame.

This release is also missing major pieces of documentation, and there
are many parts of the docs that have not been updated to reflect the
new options and features in 3.0.

Major new features:
-------------------

- Active Directory support. This release is able to join a ADS realm
  as a member server and authenticate users using
  LDAP/kerberos. Please read ADS-HOWTO.txt in the release for a very
  rough guide on how to set this up.

- Unicode support. Samba will now negotiate unicode on the wire and
  interally there is now a much better infrastructure for multi-byte
  and unicode character sets. You may need the "dos charset", "unix
  charset" and "display charset" options. The unicode support is not
  yet documented. 

- New authentication system. The internal authentication system has
  been almost completely rewritten. Most of the changes are internal,
  but the new auth system is also very configurable. Not documented
  yet.

- new filename mangling system. The filename mangling system has been
  completely rewritten. An internal database now stores mangling maps
  persistantly. This needs lots of testing.

- new "net" command. A new "net" command has been added. It is
  somewhat similar to the "net" command in windows. Eventually we plan
  to replace a bunch of other utilities (such as smbpasswd) with
  subcommands in "net", at the moment only a few things are
  implemented.

- Samba now negotiates NT-style status32 codes on the wire. This
  improves error handling a lot.

- better w2k printing support. The support for printing from win2000
  clients has improved greatly. 

Plus lots of other changes!

Note that many new features are not documented. Don't let this stop
you from using Samba 3.0. It is particularly important that the basic
file/print serving abilities of Samba 3.0 are widely tested to ensure
that we have not broken any of the basic functionality. As we do more
alpha releases we will start to document the new features.


Reporting bugs & Development Discussion
---------------------------------------

Please discuss this release on the samba-technical mailing list or by
joining the #samba-technical IRC channel on irc.openprojects.net

If you do report problems then please try to send high quality
feedback. If you don't provide vital information to help us track down
the problem then you will probably be ignored.