[ANNOUNCE] Samba 4.0 alpha 17

[Andrew Bartlett]

We are proud to a announce another alpha release of Samba 4.0, alpha 17

What's new in Samba 4.0 alpha17
===============================

Samba 4.0 will be the next version of the Samba suite and incorporates
all the technology found in both the Samba4 alpha series and the
stable 3.x series. The primary additional features over Samba 3.6 are
support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000
and above.

WARNINGS
========

Samba4 alpha17 is not a final Samba release, however we are now making
good progress towards a Samba 4.0 release, of which this is a preview.
Be aware the this release contains both the technology of Samba 3.6
(that you can reasonably expect to upgrade existing Samba 3.x releases
to) and the AD domain controller work previously known as 'samba4'.

While binaries for the stable file server are provided in this
release, for a stable, supported file server, Samba3 domain or AD
domain member installation, please run a Samba 3.x release, as we are
still bedding down the new single build system.

Samba4 is subjected to an awesome battery of tests on an automated
basis, we have found Samba 4.0 to be very stable in it's behavior.
However, we still recommend against upgrading production servers from
Samba 3.x release to Samba 4.0 alpha at this stage.

If you are upgrading, or looking to develop, test or deploy Samba 4.0
alpha releases, you should backup all configuration and data.

NEW FEATURES
============

Samba 4.0 alpha supports the server-side of the Active Directory logon
environment used by Windows 2000 and later, so we can do full domain
join and domain logon operations with these clients.

Our Domain Controller (DC) implementation includes our own built-in
LDAP server and Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) as well as the
Samba3-like logon services provided over CIFS.  We correctly generate
the infamous Kerberos PAC, and include it with the Kerberos tickets we
issue.

Samba 4.0 alpha ships with two distinct file servers.  The file server
from the Samba 3.x series is 'smbd', and works with the binaries users
would expect from that series (nmbd, winbindd, smbpasswd).

Samba 4.0 also ships with a new file server, which is tuned to match
the requirements of an AD domain controller.  Users should not use the
file server in the 'samba' binary for non-DC related tasks.

A new scripting interface has been added to Samba 4, allowing Python
programs to interface to Samba's internals, and many tools and
internal workings of the DC code is now implemented in python.


CHANGES SINCE alpha16
=====================

For a list of changes since alpha 15, please see the git log.

$ git clone git://git.samba.org/samba.git
$ cd samba.git
$ git log release-4-0-0alpha16..release-4-0-0alpha17

Some major user-visible changes include:

samba-tool dbcheck
------------------

We now have an fsck-like tool for Samba's internal sam.ldb database.
Run samba-tool dbcheck after installation to check your database for
self-consistency.  Any database created with a previous Samba4 alpha
will have a very large number of consistency errors, which this tool
can fix.

See also the -H option to point dbcheck at a different database to the
default, and the --fix and --yes options to make changes and to not
prompt about those changes. 

After upgrading Samba, it is suggested that you do the following:

  - stop samba
  - take a backup copy of your sam.ldb and sam.ldb.d/* database files
  - run samba-tool dbcheck --cross-ncs --fix
  - use 'all' to say yes to fixing each type of error found
  - after it has finished, run dbcheck again to ensure it reports no
    errors

There will be a lot of errors fixed, particularly related to
bad/missing GUID values. This is due to a bug in previous releases
that left many objects with bad GUID values. These can all be fixed
using dbcheck with steps above.


New default paths
-----------------

The configure options for paths have changed again, and the
--enable-fhs option has been reinstated.  Packagers should attempt to
first package Samba using:

./configure --enable-fhs --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

and only after examining the location Samba uses with these options
should further changes be made.  Existing packaging scripts are not
expected to work unmodified, instead the Samba Team's aim is to
simplify such scripts for the long term. 

samba-tool domain samba3upgrade
-------------------------------

The new samba-tool domain samba3upgrade command is a supported upgrade route from Samba
3.x domain controllers to Samba 4.0 AD domain controllers.  This
provides a one-time migration of all users, domain members, passwords,
groups, group members and account polcies. 

This tool is still under development and may fail when presented with
an inconsistant Samba3 database (such as many LDAP configurations).
We hope to improve the error handling and recovery in these
situations, so please provide feedback using the samba-technical
mailing list.

KNOWN ISSUES
============

- Installation on systems without a system iconv (and developer
  headers at compile time) is known to cause errors when dealing with
  non-ASCII characters.

- In some situations, group members may not be upgraded by the
  samba-tool domain upgrade_from_s3 script

- The samba-tool domain join script will not join Windows 2000 domains.

- Domain member support in the 'samba' binary is in it's infancy, and
  is not comparable to the support found in winbindd.  As such, do not
  use the 'samba' binary (provided for the AD server) on a member
  server.

- There is no printing support in the 'samba' binary (use smbd instead)

- There is no NetBIOS browsing support (network neighbourhood) in the
  'samba' binary (use nmbd and smbd instead)

- Clock Synchronisation is critical.  Many 'wrong password' errors are
  actually due to Kerberos objecting to a clock skew between client
  and server.  (The NTP work in the previous alphas are partly to assist
  with this problem).

- The DRS replication code may fail.  Please contact the team if you
  experience issues with DRS replication, as we have fixed many issues
  here in response to feedback from our production users. 

RUNNING Samba 4.0 as an AD DC
=============================

A short guide to setting up Samba 4 as an AD DC can be found on the wiki:

  http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba4/HOWTO

#######################################
Reporting bugs & Development Discussion
#######################################

Please discuss this release on the samba-technical mailing list or by
joining the #samba-technical IRC channel on irc.freenode.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.  All bug reports should
be filed under the Samba 4.0 product in the project's Bugzilla
database (https://bugzilla.samba.org/).


======================================================================
== Our Code, Our Bugs, Our Responsibility.
== The Samba Team
======================================================================


Download Details
================

The release tarball is available from the following location:
 * http://download.samba.org/samba/ftp/samba4/samba-4.0.0alpha17.tar.gz

This release has been signed using GPG with Andrew's GPG key 28B436BB).

 * http://download.samba.org/samba/ftp/samba4/samba-4.0.0alpha17.tar.asc

To verify that the signature is correct, make sure that the tarball has
been unzipped and run:

$ gpg --verify samba-4.0.0alpha17.tar.asc

Happy testing!

The Samba team
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org