Linux Blogs2k

Samba has released its new version of its award-winning Free Software fie and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients: Samba 3.2.

Samba has built on the previous release, by “by modernizing and enhancing the code whilst still retaining compatibility with all existing Samba installations.” Boasting that they are the leading technology choice for “Windows file serving on UNIX platforms and in embedded Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions,” Samba is used by vendors selling NAS solutions ranging from high end clustered business-critical systems, to low-end consumer devices.

Samba 3.2, in conjunction with the ctdb libraries and a back-end distributed file system such as Sun’s Lustre, IBM’s GPFS or Red Hat’s GFS, and provides a fully clustered file server solution. Each node is able to simultaneously serve an identical, consistent view of the exported file system.

Not just a simple “fail-over” high availability solution, Samba 3.2 with ctdb provides a scalable clustered file server solution with full Windows file sharing semantics. Samba and ctdb are already being shipped in production file serving products to some of the most demanding customers in the world in fields such as animation and video production.

Samba 3.2 introduces a ‘registry’ based configuration system. This allows vendors embedding Samba in an appliance to more easily manage Samba configuration via the supplied commands or library functions without having to write scripts to modify a text file.

Samba 3.2 has been designed and tested to integrate with the latest Microsoft Windows clients and servers, such as Windows Vista service pack 1, and Windows server 2008.

Samba 3.2 has extended the CIFS/SMB protocol to allow transport encryption. File system shares may now be marked as “encrypted” and all access to these shares is now encrypted over the network. Standard GSSAPI encryption techniques are used to safeguard the data. This extension to the CIFS/SMB protocol is open and available for other vendors to adopt without requiring patent licenses or other restrictions.

The memory footprint of Samba has been reduced by the use of the Samba developed “talloc” library, in order to allow greater use of Samba in embedded devices with limited memory requirements. All restrictions on file name lengths have been removed.

The networking functions have been re-written to ensure Samba 3.2 is fully IPv6 compliant. Customers may now use Samba in an IPv6-only network, and it has been tested to work with Microsoft Windows (R) IPv6 implementations as well as UNIX (R) IPv6 implementations.

Samba 3.2 begins the migration of Samba from a monolithic application to a more modular architecture comprised of library functions which can be used to control and configure the Samba environment. The new libnetapi library to control domain membership is one of the first examples of this new approach.

The Samba Team has adopted the Version 3 of the GNU General Public License for the 3.2 and later releases. The GPLv3 is the updated version of the GPLv2 license under which Samba is currently distributed. It has been updated to improve compatibility with other licenses and to make it easier to adopt internationally, and is an improved version of the license to better suit the needs of Free Software in the 21st Century.