To release Samba 4.0 'as is'

[Ricky Nance]

As an end user my input may not be worth much, but here goes anyway. I just
completed my samba3upgrade (migration) to samba 4, I spent the last 2 weeks
working with Amitay and Andrew B. getting this migration to go as smooth as
possible. First, I had about 5 duplicate SID's I had to fix, then there
were some group import issues that Amitay patched up for me, once the
migration was successful, he worked out some password expiration issues as
well, finally I ended up with a smooth migration that didn't have expired
users, next thing was none of my shares imported over to the new smb.conf
(took an hour to work out what samba 4 didn't like about them), then I went
to rejoin a computer to the domain, since the account already existed it
failed (this worked on samba 3 by the way, deleting the computer from AD
fixed this), not a deal breaker, so time to do this on my production
server. Tonight I did my production migration and full setup (including
bind configuration) within an hour, once going I faced a few more issues
that happened to be with file/folder permissions, and likely will spend
another hour or two figuring out how to take care those. All in all it went
pretty well, had those guys not been around to work through those bugs
though, I would have had a heck of a time getting this done.

With that all being said, I would say if a full migration can be done
within an hour by ME, then samba 4 should be ready to at least hit a beta
or first full release (How long has it been in alpha now?)
PS. Samba 4 not being able to print might be a big issue still for some.
Also Microsoft Windows 2000 shipped with 65000 known bugs... Is anything
ever really ready to be released? Isn't that what updates are for? Time to
get some stable packages out on the repos and get users actively
testing/working with samba 4.

Thats my .02 cents worth,
Ricky (aka RiXtEr)

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 9:32 PM, Andrew Tridgell <tridge at samba.org> wrote:

> Hi Jeremy,
>
> > -1. We can't do this. It isn't an integrated product yet,
> > it's just a grab bag of non-integrated features.
>
> I don't get this. The same binaries with the same behaviour as we have
> now will be part of this release. We will also have a major new feature,
> being an AD DC, and if you setup a DC then you get different file
> serving capabilities.
>
> The same thing happened when we added support for clustering. If you
> didn't use clustering then you got the existing features. If you did use
> clustering then some existing features (eg. printing) did not work
> correctly.
>
> > Without proper design and code to implement the source3 fileserver,
> > winbind and nmbd integration we simply don't have a finished
> > product. The integrated fileserver is a MUST HAVE for a 4.0 release.
>
> Integrating the file server portion when you are an AD DC isn't the
> biggest task in this list. We have had demonstrations of that for a
> while, although the methods Andrew and I chose to use to implement it
> weren't liked by some people so they never made it into master.
>
> The biggest and hardest task is winbind, and the basic problem is that
> the s3 winbind is just not well suited for a AD DC, especially in a
> multi-domain forest.
>
> > Rightly or wrongly Samba4 is seen as the replacement
> > for Samba3. If you ship what you have now you put the
> > Team members who support OEM fileservers in an incredibly
> > difficult position w.r.t. marketing and communications
> > with our customers, not to mention the Linux distros.
>
> no, their existing setups just keep working. It is only if they decide
> to setup an AD DC that things change.
>
> Cheers, Tridge
>



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