Samba4 technology preview

[tridge at samba.org]

A quick update on plans for a Samba4 'preview' release ...

A couple of months ago we discussed the plan to do a 'technology
preview' release of Samba4 about this time. From my point of view the
main thing that we needed to get done before that release was the web
management interface, as without the ability to easily manage the
server it is quite frustrating to try it out.

Since then the web management interface has stalled while Deryck and I
work out some details with the javascript widget set we are using
(Deryck can perhaps provide more details on that discussion). I didn't
want to hold off on the preview release for too long, so I have
instead been working on getting mmc based management of Samba4 to
work, which mostly means a lot of work on our LDAP server and ldb
code.

As of yesterday I've managed to get it to the point that I can
add/remove users and groups on a Samba4 ADS DC using mmc. The code is
currently in a 'rigged demo' state, using a little ldb proxy module to
proxy the CN=Schema subtree to a w2k3 DC, but it doesn't look like it
will be long before we have mmc management working with a standalone
Samba4 DC. The main thing missing is the schema introspection support
(for things like the allowedChildClassesEffective attribute).

So once that is all working I would like to propose that we revive the
idea of a technology preview release, to get more people involved with
trying out Samba4. We'll still be missing a lot of fundamental
features, but at least using the features we do have will be a little
less frustrating.

So assuming things go well, I hope we will do this in the next
month. (I am off to a conference in Beijing next week, but might get
some of the LDAP work done while travelling).

Cheers, Tridge