[Samba] Why is Samba4 not recommended as a file server?

[Mark Foley]

Since you bring up that topic (Samba4 not recommended as a file server), I've been meaning to
ask on this list for a while: Why?

I installed Samba4 2 years ago next month.  I read then that recommendation in the wiki and
took it literaly: not actual Samba shares.  I followed the advice and we have two other
different servers acting as actual "classic" Samba file servers.  At the time, I did not take
that recommendation to mean that hosting a mail server and the like were included.

Therefore, I blithely went ahead and set up Samba4 as a full-on replacement for our retiring
Windows SBS 2008 AD/DC.  That included AD authentication, mail server (with sendmail/dovecot
replacing Exchange), Remote Desktop Connection (policy), redirected folders (certainly file
server-like), DNS, DHCP, webmail, iCal calendar server ...  and probably a bunch of stuff I'm
not thinking about at the moment.  When I figured out the various configs for the various
services (not too hard, really, except for a long stretch trying to figure out Dovecot
authentication), everything just worked, perfectly.  We've been running production for more than
a year and a half with WIN7 workstations in user offices and a couple of experimental Linux
domain member workstations.  We've never had a hiccup, never lost a file that I'm aware of and
have had zero problems with Samba4 doing all this -- which is more than I can say for good 'ole
SBS2008 in its day.

All that said to demonstrate that we've been using Samba4 for supposedly "not recommended"
purposes in a real production environment for quite a while.  Furthermore, outfits like Zentyal
must be doing the same. 

So, to repeat the main question: Why is Samba4 not recommended for this sort of thing? I've
not come across actual reasons. Maybe too bit-specific technical for this list, but I like
someone to at least speculate on the reason. I'm curious.

--Mark

-----Original Message-----
> To: samba at lists.samba.org
> From: Rowland penny <rpenny at samba.org>
> Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2016 22:13:43 +0100
> Subject: Re: [Samba] sendmail getting domain\user as email userId
>
[delted]
>
> As for the info you would like adding to the wiki, it used to be there, 
> but when the wiki was re-written, it was removed. The thinking seemed to 
> be, as samba doesn't recommend using the DC as a fileserver, it 
> shouldn't be there. Samba has been recommending not using the DC as a 
> fileserver since version 4 was first released, this was nearly 4 years 
> ago. Perhaps, due to the many changes since the first release, it is 
> time to reconsider this recommendation.
>
> Rowland