[Samba] samba4 readiness

[simo]

On Thu, 2006-08-17 at 12:00 -0700, Shawn Wilson wrote:
> i wanted to setup a samba4 domain, however i had a couple of questions:
> 1. i was thinking of using centos, however was curious what linux distro most
> people use. ie what most of the samba4 documentation is written for?
> 2. i had read that there isn't much support for user land programs for setting
> up samba4 and account administration, and that swat isn't emplimented yet; how
> dated / acurate is this information?
> 3. i don't have a domain name (fqdn) at this site. is there a way to setup a
> domain without owning a fqdn?
> 4. if i download and setup samba4 from cvs; how stable is it currently, what
> changes might be made that would effect a current configuration, or what might
> a future release break in current cvs.
> 5. how far is current cvs from being samba4-stable? (estimated date and feature
> set)

Shawn,
Samba4 is still experimental, while we try to keep it as stable as
possible and subsystems tend do be stable, there is still a lot to do,
and we may break compatibility with any existing installation.
We are still working out some details on password management for
example, and it is likely that we will change the directory attributes
and formats used to store passwords in the future. Also we still have to
address replication issues, so achieving that functionality may also
require breaking compatibility with a previous samba4 snapshot.

We don;t have decent administration tools yet, but you should be able to
use a Windows workstation and point to the server to be able to
administer it with MS native tools (For users and groups at least).

That said, you don;t need a real domain name to experiment you can use a
name of your choice with the suffix .local

About stability, I can say that the code compiles and passes all make
and torture tests, but, as said, we do not guarantee any
forward/backward compatibility at this point. So getting it from our SVN
tree can be a nice experiment, but you may require to re-install to use
a later version.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer
email: idra at samba.org
http://samba.org