Which Samba - 3.0.x, 3.2 or 4.0?

[tridge at samba.org]

Arup,

 > - How long should I wait before I could  re-base to Samba 4.0?

NAS vendors should start putting some effort into developing for
Samba4 right now.

One of the biggest things that Samba4 gives you is the ability to take
full advantage of advanced filesystem features, so if your NAS product
is capable of supporting file streams, ACLs, dos attributes, case
insensitivity etc natively in the filesystem then it will be easy to
take full advantage of those features in Samba4 by writing a NTVFS
backend. In Samba3 it is quite difficult to properly (and efficiently)
take advantage of these sorts of filesystem features.

Please take a close look at source/ntvfs/posix/ to see an example
NTVFS backend for Samba4. Then think about what additional filesystem
features your NAS box could offer, and look at how those might be
implemented in your own NTVFS backend.

 > In other words, no printing support, we do not want to become domain 
 > controller or WINS server, no user-group mapping
 > support etc.

Samba4 will extend the capabilities of Samba in just about every
area. While a lot of effort has gone into the domain protocols
recently, that isn't the only area that has improved. The original aim
of Samba4 (see my talk at SambaXP 2 years ago) was to improve the
basic file sharing structures, and that has certainly happened.

Samba4 is still in development of course, and many pieces are not
written yet. For example, the equivalent of nmbd and winbind don't
exist yet, and neither does smbstatus, smbcontrol, swat and many other
essentials. This means that Samba4 is not yet appropriate for
production use. Please don't let that stop you getting involved in the
development process now.

Cheers, Tridge