Software Update: Samba 3.0.0 RC2

Exchanging files between a PC with Windows and a computer with another OS can be a disaster. Fortunately, users are long past the closed standard that Microsoft uses for this sort of thing: with the help of a lot of smart programmers, Samba can solve a lot of your problems. Although there is very little information coming from Redmond regarding the way Windows file exchange works, the open source project still succeeds time and again in letting PCs with Linux, for example, have a good conversation with their colleagues at Microsoft.

Unfortunately, no piece of software is immediately perfect, which is why the developers of Samba put out a number of Release Candidates before finalizing version 3 release. If an RC no longer contains any obvious bugs, it will be turned into a final. Unfortunately, the previous candidate still had too many bugs, as we can now find RC2 on the project’s site. There’s a lot again improvedthe main one of which looks like this:

1) Add levels 261 and 262 to search. Found using Samba4 tester.
2) Correct bad error return code in session setup reply
3) Fix bug where smbd returned DOS error codes from SMBsearch even when NT1 protocol was negotiated.
4) Implement SMBexit properly.
5) Return group lists from a Samba PDC to a Windows 9x/ME box in implementing user level access control (bug 314).
6) Prevent SWAT from crashing when adding shares (bug 254)
7) Fix various documentation issues (bugs 304 & 214)
8) Fix wins server listing in SWAT (bug 197)
9) Fix problem in rpcclient that caused enumerating printer drivers to report failure (bug 294).
10) Use kerberos 5 authentication in our client code whenever possible
11) Fix schannel bug that caused Active Directory DC’s to downgrade our machine account to an NT member.
12) Implement missing SAMR_REMOVE_USER_FOREIGN_DOMAIN call (bug 252).
13) Implement automatic generation of include/version.h
14) Include initial version of smbldap-tool scripts for the Samba 3.0 schema.
15) Implement numerous fixes for multi-byte character strings.
16) Enable ‘unix extensions’ parameter by default.
17) Make sure we set the SID type when falling back to the rid algorithm (bug 245).
18) Correct linking problems with pam_smbpass (bug 327).
19) Add SYSV defines for Irix and Solaris to ensure the ‘printing’ parameter default to the correct value (bug 230)
20) Fix recursion bug in alloc_string_sub() (bug 289, et al.)
21) Ensure that ‘make install’ includes the static and shared versions of the libsmbclient libraries.
22) Add CP850 and CP437 internal character set support (bug 150).
23) Add support to examples/LDAP/convertSambaAccount for generating LDIF modify files instead of just add (303).
24) Fix support for -W option in smbclient (bug 39)
25) Remove ‘ldap trust ids’ parameter since it could not be supported by the current architecture.
26) Don’t crash when no argument is given to -T in smbclient (bug 345).
27) Ensure smbadduser contains the same paths for the smbpasswd file as the other Samba tools (bug 290).
28) Port of ‘available = no’ fix for [homes] from SAMBA_2_2 cvs tree.
29) Add sanity checks to DeletePrinterData[Ex]() and ensure that the modified printer is written to disk.
30) Force winbindd to periodically update the trusted domain cache.
31) Remove outdated import/export script to convert an smbpasswd file to and from and LDAP directory. Use the pdbedit tool instead.
32) Ensure that %U substitution is restored on next valid packet if a logon fails.[break]If you would like to play with the new version, you can do it here to pick up. If you don’t feel like compiling the software yourself, you can here see if a binary is already available.