Samba3

Samba 3 is the current stable production version of Samba.

Samba 3 Features

• Stable, scalable File and Print server
• Windows NT and AD domain member

Samba 3 Roadmap

This is a compilation of things that we want to achieve in future versions of Samba 3.

• Easier configurability, more than 300 options in the smb.conf configuration file are way too many
• Internal restructuring to make contributions easier. We have come a long way in this respect since Samba 3.0 days, but we need to improve a lot.
  • An important subproject of the internal restructuring is to make use of shared libraries. With Samba 3.2 we internally separated out libwbclient, libtalloc and libtdb and link them in as shared objects in all binaries. We will identify more such libraries and make them available to external projects.
• Share technology with Samba 4. For example almost all RPC code in Samba 3.2 is converted to IDL using the PIDL compiler from Samba 4
• Implement 100% of NTFS semantics as seen by clients:
  • NTFS Alternate Data Streams support: This is done in Samba 3.2 with the streams_xattr and streams_depot modules, testing and ideas for different coding schemes for streams are welcome
  • Windows-compatible ACLs: On [1] Volker Lendecke has started coding in this area, help is welcome.
  • Encrypted File System: This is a completely new area, but now that the Microsoft protocol documentation is available via [2], it should be possible to implement.

Compiling Samba 3

Samba has a number of build-time configuration options. These control options and features that can be useful in specific environments but might not be appropriate for all installations.