[Samba] Samba4 reaches the "Susan" stage

[tridge at samba.org]

Samba4 reached an important milestone tonight, as I installed it for
my wife to use as her file server for all of her important documents,
email, the book she is working on etc.

Those of you who have been around Samba development for a while will
know that my wife tends to be the first test user of major new
versions of Samba, and she volunteered again this time. Susan played a
large part in the original motivation to develop Samba more than 12
years ago, so she knows how useful it is to have a local test user.

Reaching this stage does not mean that you should now go and install
Samba4 on your production servers. Only a very keen (foolish?) person
would do that. The code is quite incomplete, and is missing major
features such as no netbios name server, no winbind, no admin tools,
and very little documentation. So unless you are a keen C programmer
then stay well clear for the moment.

What this milestone means is that the code is now fairly robust, and
that major applications (Eudora, OpenOffics.org, MS Word, Firefox etc)
all work well and that I am quite confident of not losing data. Of
course, I also have a very strict automated backup regime setup for my
wife, so if I'm wrong about the robustness we can recover without me
having to cook dinner for a week as penance.

The code isn't available as a "alpha" quality release yet, as there
are just too many missing features, although I do plan on doing a
"snapshot" release shortly (maybe within a week?).

So far the only problem on my wifes machine is that Eudora startup is
a bit slow. That is caused by Norton Anti-Virus on her WinXP box
scanning all the dlls and the exe, along with the fact that Samba4
does not yet have oplocks, so the client cannot cache the files for
fast re-scanning. With norton disabled startup is fast.

If you want to get involved in Samba4 development then see
http://devel.samba.org/, checkout the code, and start reading. Having
at look at the (incomplete) prog_guide.txt is a good idea.

If you just want to see some slides on the design of Samba4, then
there are some links to various talks I've given on my homepage at
http://samba.org/~tridge/

I'd like to thank everyone who has worked so hard over the last couple
of years to get us this far. It's been a long haul, but the results
are well worth it. Samba4 is a great basis for future Samba
development.

In particular I'd like to thank the members of the Samba Team who have
put so much into the development of Samba4. It's been a great team
effort, and a lot of fun.

Now back to more coding ....

Cheers, Tridge