Samba and legacy Windows support

[ronnie sahlberg]

On Tue, Oct 8, 2019 at 7:00 PM Andreas Schneider via samba-technical
<samba-technical at lists.samba.org> wrote:
>
> Samba with version 4.11 currently still support a lot of systems which are
> already out of support. We still get bugs to either fix support for Windows
> NT4 or OS/2. Also we know that Windows Server 2003 with Active Directory is
> still deployed.
>
> In order to remove support for those platforms which are very long EOL, we
> should try to make announcements when we plan to remove support.
>
> ## Steps planned
>
> With Samba 4.12 we plan to disable SMB1 by default and then remove support for
> it in Samba 4.13 or 4.14. This means end of 2020 or beginning of 2021.
>
> If we remove support for SMB1, we could also remove support for NTLMv1 and
> Kerberos support for DES, 3DES and maybe RC4. Already on Fedora 31 use of
> these encryption types is blocked by the default system-wide policy and is not
> available through MIT Kerberos. DES support is fully removed from MIT Kerberos
> 1.17.
>
> NTMLv2 is still widely used and it uses RC4. This means we can't remove
> support for it till there is a valid replacement for the pure file server
> case.
>
> ## Questions
>
> * Can we remove NTLMv1 and LM keys for Samba 4.12 (remove `libcli/auth/
> smbdes.c`)?
> * Can we remove DES and 3DES Kerberos support for Samba 4.12?
> * When can we remove RC4 support with Kerberos?

My opinion:
First two questions: Yes.
Third question: at the same time.

There is always going to be older versions of samba available to those
few that need obsolete features.
Eventhough no one ships a default distro with telnet installed or
activated any more, the twelve people in the world that need
telnetd can download/install/use it just fine.

>
>
>
>         Andreas
>
>
> --
> Andreas Schneider                      asn at samba.org
> Samba Team                             www.samba.org
> GPG-ID:     8DFF53E18F2ABC8D8F3C92237EE0FC4DCC014E3D
>
>
>