New Samba alpha - 1.9.17alpha5

[Jeremy Allison]

The Samba Team have just released a new alpha version of
Samba - 1.9.17alpha5. It is our hope that this will be the
last version of the 1.9.17 alpha series before the full
1.9.17 release.

The new release is available from the URL:

ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/alpha/samba-1.9.17alpha5.tar.gz

and is in the form of a gzip'ed tar file.

Here is the WHATSNEW.txt from the release.

Regards,

       The Samba Team.
       samba-bugs at samba.anu.edu.au

--------------cut here------------------------------------

              WHATS NEW IN 1.9.17alpha5 - July 31st 1997.
              ==========================================

Last Alpha before full release.
-------------------------------

It is our intention that 1.9.17alpha5 be the last alpha
before the full 1.9.17 release. If you are concerned that
Samba 1.9.17 compile cleanly out of the box on your platform
please try 1.9.17alpha5 and make sure it compiles for your
particular platform. Please let samba-bugs at samba.anu.edu.au
know if you have problems.

The differences between 1.9.17alpha4 and 1.9.17alpha5 are
mainly tidying code to ensure portability over different
platforms (although some new code has been added).

Thanks to Cisco for the new netbios alias code support.

Improved browsing support. 
--------------------------

Samba now should support propagation of browse lists 
across subnets correctly. Look in the file docs/BROWSING.txt 
as it has been largely re-written to explain how to do this.

*IMPORTANT* All Samba servers acting as local/domain master
browsers must be running 1.9.17alpha3 (or later).

Thanks to Silicon Graphics for allowing us to test the new 
code on their corporate network.


Improved share mode handling
----------------------------

The handling of share modes has been completely rewritten.
Samba can now run agressive PC Benchmarks (Ziff-Davis
NetBench) correctly with many hundreds of concurrent PC's.
The confidence level on share mode handling in Samba
is now much higher than it was previously. PC database
packages should be much safer when run against a
Samba share. Thanks to Silicon Graphics for testing
this code for us.

If at all possible compile Samba to use the new share
mode handling with shared memory (set the flags 
FAST_SHARE_MODES in the Makefile). This will be *much* faster
than old file-based share modes. FAST_SHARE_MODES have
been turned on by default on the following platforms in
the Makefile :

	Linux
	Solaris
	BSDI
	IRIX 5.x.x
	FreeBSD

Updated smb.conf documentation
------------------------------
All options are now documented we believe.

Many bugfixes and improvements
------------------------------
>From around the 'net around the world. Many
thanks to everyone who contributed.

Some of the changes since alpha4 are:

*** Alias names for Samba servers.
*** Fixes for smbtar.
*** New "follow symlinks" option can prevent any 
    symlink following for security reasons.
*** Authentication for Kerberos 5 clients (note that
    this is not the same as the Kerberos 5 Microsoft
    will be using, that has not yet been documented).
*** smbpasswd can now add users to the smbpasswd file.
*** Hex dump style of debug packets.

Remaining known issues with cross-subnet browsing.
--------------------------------------------------
When nmbd is acting as a WINS server it doesn't handle
de-registering of members of a WORKGROUP<1e> name correctly.
The first machine to de-register will remove the name. This
should be fixed in a later release when group names are 
handled correctly in the WINS code.

Remember - this is new code so there may be
bugs or problems.

As always, all bugs are our responsibility - 
please report them to :

samba-bugs at samba.anu.edu.au


Regards,

	The Samba Team.