Download Samba 3.0.0 RC1

On the SAMBA webpage we can read about the most recent release of this open source project. Despite the little documentation Microsoft has released on this subject, SAMBA has been trying for a long time to allow non-Windows PCs to use Microsoft’s file sharing method as well. A lot of progress has been made in that time, but the developers still see room for improvement. Big improvement in fact, since they released a release candidate for the brand new version 3 of SAMBA yesterday. The main improvements look like this:

1) Active Directory support. Samba 3.0 is now able to join a ADS realm as a member server and authenticate users using LDAP/Kerberos.
2) Unicode support. Samba will now negotiate UNICODE on the wire and internally there is now a much better infrastructure for multi-byte and UNICODE character sets.
3) 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.
4) New default filename mangling system.
5) A new “net” command has been added. It is somewhat similar to the “net” command in windows. Eventually we plan to replace numerous other utilities (such as smbpasswd) with subcommands in “net”.
6) Samba now negotiates NT-style status32 codes on the wire. This improves error handling a lot.
7) Better Windows 2000/XP/2003 printing support including publishing printer attributes in active directory.
8) New loadable RPC modules.
9) New default dual daemon winbindd support for better performance.
10) Support for migrating from a Windows NT 4.0 domain to a Samba domain and maintaining user, group and domain SIDs.
11) Support for establishing trust relationships with Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers.
12) Initial support for a distributed Winbind architecture using an LDAP directory for storing SID to uid/gid mappings.
13) Major updates to the Samba documentation tree.
14) Full support for client and server SMB signing to ensure compatibility with default Windows 2003 security settings.[break]The new version of SAMBA is here in the form of source codes that you still have to compile yourself. There are also more and more already compiled binaries available, you can use them here find.