On the road to 4.0 alpha17

Andrew Bartlett abartlet at samba.org
Fri Jul 8 16:43:51 MDT 2011


I wanted to discuss our progress towards releasing an alpha17, and what
I would like to see in that release, and what I'm doing over the next
little while towards that.

I'm hoping to work on improving the integration of the whole Samba 4.0
suite, particularly continuing to integrate loadparm.  Patches for some
more work here are in autobuild, and I hope to continue working here.

I'm not yet proposing any drastic changes to loadparm beyond what is
already evident.  For my purposes the two implementations retain so much
in common that simply removing the divergence in the key elements (the
param table, the struct loadparm_globals and struct loadparm_locals)
will probably be enough in the short term.  That said, one area that
needs particular care is to ensure consistency in the way default values
do need to be handled.  I'll write more about this in another mail
soon. 

I'm starting to take a look at migration from existing Samba 3
installations to Samba 4.0, and hope to extend the upgrade_from_s3
script to use passdb (adding python bindings at some level).  I've been
looking at the code, and it may be desirable to make the passdb
interface a top level API, using the s3_loadparm_ctx() code to get a
hook back across to the s3 loadparm.  Either way, having a script that
handles the provision and upgrades the existing databases, preserving
SIDs etc is an the critical path for a release.  I would prefer that
with the common tree, we use the original code to read/write the
databases where possible, to ensure we upgrade correctly.

The other things that I hope to see happen in the next few weeks are the
psudobacklinks work that Matthieu has been working on.  This will make
'sites' support work in the real world, because the serverReference will
follow the DC as it moves between sites. 

Tridge and Matthieu have been working on a wonderful tool called
samba-tool dbcheck, which is like a fsck for our database.  Some of it
made alpha16, but by alpha17 I hope this will hopefully be ready to be
recommended to our users.  

Metze has also been busy, and we now have initial support for S4U2Self
and S4U2Proxy, which will make our CIFS and RPC proxy server much more
useful, as well as supporting this for other AD servers.

Finally, I've been able to fix up some of the build (underlinking)
issues that have hit some users of Samba4.  In particular, when linking
an internal copy of ldb, -Wl,-no-undefined was added to the compiler
command, which broke against the Samba3 libraries which so far cannot
link with fully defined symbols.  I've fixed that both ways - by adding
correct deps, and avoiding that flag. 

I think the end of the month would be a good goal to get an alpha 17.
After that, we better start talking about prereleases for Samba 4.0!

Andrew Bartlett

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





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