Samba 2.0 Beta1 released !

[Jeremy Allison]

The Samba Team are pleased to announce Samba 2.0 Beta1

This is the first of (hopefully) a short series of Beta
releases of the 2.0 code.

We are relasing these Betas to enable the Samba Team to gain
wider testing of the new autoconf mechanism and fix any
bugs before the first ship of the new stable version of
Samba - Samba 2.0.

Samba 2.0 Beta1 is available in source form at the
following URL (it will be available from our mirror
sites shortly) :

http://samba.anu.edu.au/samba/ftp/beta/samba-2.0.0beta1.tar.gz

Please try this code and give us feedback.

The WHATSNEW.txt file follows.

As always, any bugs are our responsibility,

Regards,

	The Samba Team.


-----------------------------------------------------------
          WHATS NEW IN Samba 2.0.0 beta1
          ==============================

This is a MAJOR new release of Samba, the UNIX based SMB/CIFS file 
and print server for Windows systems.

There have been many changes in Samba since the last major release,
1.9.18.  These have mainly been in the areas of performance and
SMB protocol correctness.  In addition, a Web based GUI interface
for configuring Samba has been added.

In addition, Samba has been re-written to help portability to
other POSIX-based systems, based on the GNU autoconf tool.

Major changes in Samba 2.0
--------------------------

There are many major changes in Samba for version 2.0.  Here are 
some of them:

=====================================================================

1). Speed
---------

Samba has been benchmarked on high-end UNIX hardware as out-performing
all other SMB/CIFS servers using the Ziff-Davis NetBench benchmark.
Many changes to the code to optimise high-end performance have been made.

2). Correctness
---------------

Samba now supports the Windows NT specific SMB requests.  This
means that on platforms that are capable Samba now presents a
64 bit view of the filesystem to Windows NT clients and is
capable of handling very large files.

3). Portability
---------------

Samba is now self-configuring using GNU autoconf, removing
the need for people installing Samba to have to hand configure
Makefiles, as was needed in previous versions.

You now configure Samba by running "./configure" then "make".  See
docs/textdocs/UNIX_INSTALL.txt for details.

4). Web based GUI configuration
-------------------------------

Samba now comes with SWAT, a web based GUI config system.  See
the swat man page for details on how to set it up.

5). Cross protocol data integrity
---------------------------------

An open function interface has been defined to allow 
"opportunistic locks" (oplocks for short) granted by Samba
to be seen by other UNIX processes.  This allows complete
cross protocol (NFS and SMB) data integrety using Samba
with platforms that support this feature.

6). Domain client capability
----------------------------

Samba is now capable of using a Windows NT PDC for user
authentication in exactly the same way that a Windows NT
workstation does, i.e. it can be a member of a Domain.  See
docs/textdocs/DOMAIN_MEMBER.txt for details.

7). Documentation Updates
-------------------------

All the reference parts of the Samba documentation (the
manual pages) have been updated and converted to a document
format that allows automatic generation of HTML, SGML, and
text formats.  These documents now ship as standard in HTML
and manpage format.

=====================================================================

NOTE - Some important option defaults changed
---------------------------------------------

Several parameters have changed their default values.  The most
important of these is that the default security mode is now user
level security rather than share level security.

This (incompatible) change was made to ease new Samba installs
as user level security is easier to use for Windows 95/98 and
Windows NT clients.

********IMPORTANT NOTE****************

If you have no "security=" line in the [global] section of 
your current smb.conf and you update to Samba 2.0 you will
need to add the line :

security=share

to get exactly the same behaviour with Samba 2.0 as you
did with previous versions of Samba.

********END IMPORTANT NOTE*************

In addition, Samba now defaults to case sensitivity options that
match a Windows NT server precisely, that is, case insensitive 
but case preserving.

=====================================================================

NOTE - Primary Domain Controller Functionality
----------------------------------------------

This version of Samba contains code that correctly implements
the undocumented Primary Domain Controller authentication
protocols.  However, there is much more to being a Primary
Domain Controller than serving Windows NT logon requests.

A useful version of a Primary Domain Controller contains
many remote procedure calls to do things like enumerate users, 
groups, and security information, only some of which Samba currently
implements.  For this reason we have chosen not to advertise
and actively support Primary Domain Controller functionality
with this release.

This work is being done in the CVS (developer) versions of Samba,
development of which continues at a fast pace.  If you are
interested in participating in or helping with this development
please join the Samba-NTDOM mailing list.  Details on joining
are available at :

http://samba.anu.edu.au/listproc/

Details on obtaining CVS (developer) versions of Samba
are available at:

http://samba.anu.edu.au/cvs.html

=====================================================================

If you have problems, or think you have found a bug please email 
a report to :

        samba-bugs at samba.anu.edu.au

As always, all bugs are our responsibility.

Regards,

        The Samba Team.  

----------------------------------------------------------------------