Samba 4.11 Features added/changed

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Samba 4.11.0

Release Notes for Samba 4.11.0
September 17, 2019


Release Announcements

This is the first stable release of the Samba 4.11 release series. Please read the release notes carefully before upgrading.


UPGRADING

AD Database compatibility

Samba 4.11 has changed how the AD database is stored on disk. AD users should not really be affected by this change when upgrading to 4.11. However, AD users should be extremely careful if they need to downgrade from Samba 4.11 to an older release.

Samba 4.11 maintains database compatibility with older Samba releases. The database will automatically get rewritten in the new 4.11 format when you first start the upgraded samba executable.

However, when downgrading from 4.11 you will need to manually downgrade the AD database yourself. Note that you will need to do this step before you install the downgraded Samba packages. For more details, see:

Downgrading_an_Active_Directory_DC

When either upgrading or downgrading, users should also avoid making any database modifications between installing the new Samba packages and starting the samba executable.

SMB1 is disabled by default

The defaults of 'client min protocol' and 'server min protocol' have been changed to SMB2_02.

This means clients without support for SMB2 or SMB3 are no longer able to connect to smbd (by default).

It also means client tools like smbclient and other, as well as applications making use of libsmbclient are no longer able to connect to servers without SMB2 or SMB3 support (by default).

It's still possible to allow SMB1 dialects, e.g. NT1, LANMAN2 and LANMAN1 for client and server, as well as CORE and COREPLUS on the client.

Note: that most commandline tools e.g. smbclient, smbcacls and others also support the '--option' argument to overwrite smb.conf options, e.g. --option='client min protocol=NT1' might be useful.

As Microsoft no longer installs SMB1 support in recent releases or uninstalls it after 30 days without usage, the Samba Team tries to get remove the SMB1 usage as much as possible.

SMB1 is officially deprecated and might be removed step by step in the following years. If you have a strong requirement for SMB1 (except for supporting old Linux Kernels), please file a bug at https://bugzilla.samba.org and let us know about the details.

LanMan and plaintext authentication deprecated

The "lanman auth" and "encrypt passwords" parameters are deprecated with this release as both are only applicable to SMB1 and are quite insecure. NTLM, NTLMv2 and Kerberos authentication are unaffected, as "encrypt passwords = yes" has been the default since Samba 3.0.0.

If you have a strong requirement for these authentication protocols, please file a bug at https://bugzilla.samba.org and let us know about the details.


BIND9_FLATFILE deprecated

The BIND9_FLATFILE DNS backend is deprecated in this release and will be removed in the future. This was only practically useful on a single domain controller or under expert care and supervision.

This release therefore deprecates the "rndc command" smb.conf parameter, which is used to support this configuration. After writing out a list of DCs permitted to make changes to the DNS Zone "rndc command" is called with reload to tell the 'named' server if a DC was added/removed to to the domain.

NEW FEATURES/CHANGES

Default samba process model

The default for the '--model' argument passed to the samba executable has changed from 'standard' to 'prefork'. This means a difference in the number of samba child processes that are created to handle client connections. The previous default would create a separate process for every LDAP or NETLOGON client connection. For a network with a lot of persistent client connections, this could result in significant memory overhead. Now, with the new default of 'prefork', the LDAP, NETLOGON, and KDC services will create a fixed number of worker processes at startup and share the client connections amongst these workers. The number of worker processes can be configured by the 'prefork children' setting in the smb.conf (the default is 4).

Authentication Logging.

Winbind now logs PAM_AUTH and NTLM_AUTH events, a new attribute "logonId" has been added to the Authentication JSON log messages. This contains a random logon id that is generated for each PAM_AUTH and NTLM_AUTH request and is passed to SamLogon, linking the windbind and SamLogon requests.

The serviceDescription of the messages is set to "winbind", the authDescriptionis set to one of:

  "PASSDB, <command>, <pid>"
  "PAM_AUTH, <command>, <pid>"
  "NTLM_AUTH, <command>, <pid>"

where:

  <command> is the name of the command makinmg the winbind request i.e. wbinfo
  <pid>     is the process id of the requesting process.

The version of the JSON Authentication messages has been changed to 1.1 from 1.2

LDAP referrals

The scheme of returned LDAP referrals now reflects the scheme of the original request, i.e. referrals received via ldap are prefixed with "ldap://" and those over ldaps are prefixed with "ldaps://".

Previously all referrals were prefixed with "ldap://".

Bind9 logging

It is now possible to log the duration of DNS operations performed by Bind9. This should aid future diagnosis of performance issues and could be used to monitor DNS performance. The logging is enabled by setting log level to "dns:10" in smb.conf.

The logs are currently Human readable text only, i.e. no JSON formatted output.

Log lines are of the form:

   <function>: DNS timing: result: [<result>] duration: (<duration>)
   zone: [<zone>] name: [<name>] data: []
   durations are in microseconds.

Default schema updated to 2012_R2

Default AD schema changed from 2008_R2 to 2012_R2. 2012_R2 functional level is not yet available. Older schemas can be used by provisioning with the '--base-schema' argument. Existing installations can be updated with the samba-tool command "domain schemaupgrade".

Samba's replication code has also been improved to handle replication with the 2012 schema (the core of this replication fix has also been backported to 4.9.11 and will be in a 4.10.x release).

For more about how the AD schema relates to overall Windows compatibility, please read:

Windows_2012_Server_compatibility

GnuTLS 3.2 required

Samba is making efforts to remove in-tree cryptographic functionality, and to instead rely on externally maintained libraries. To this end, Samba has chosen GnuTLS as our standard cryptographic provider.

Samba now requires GnuTLS 3.2 to be installed (including development headers at build time) for all configurations, not just the Samba AD DC.

NOTE WELL: The use of GnuTLS means that Samba will honour the system-wide 'FIPS mode' (a reference to the US FIPS-140 cryptographic standard) and so will not operate in many still common situations if this system-wide parameter is in effect, as many of our protocols rely on outdated cryptography.

A future Samba version will mitigate this to some extent where good cryptography effectively wraps bad cryptography, but for now that above applies.

samba-tool improvements

A new "samba-tool contact" command has been added to allow the command-line manipulation of contacts, as used for address book lookups in LDAP.

The "samba-tool [user|group|computer|group|contact] edit" command has been improved to operate more pleasantly on international character sets.

100,000 USER and LARGER Samba AD DOMAINS

Extensive efforts have been made to optimise Samba for use in organisations (for example) targeting 100,000 users, plus 120,000 computer objects, as well as large number of group memberships.

Many of the specific efforts are detailed below, but the net results is to remove barriers to significantly larger Samba deployments compared to previous releases.

Reindex performance improvements

The performance of samba-tool dbcheck --reindex has been improved, especially for large domains.

join performance improvements

The performance of samba-tool domain join has been improved, especially for large domains.

LDAP Server memory improvements

The LDAP server has improved memory efficiency, ensuring that large LDAP responses (for example a search for all objects) is not copied multiple times into memory.

Setting lmdb map size

It is now possible to set the lmdb map size (The maximum permitted size for the database). "samba-tool" now accepts the "--backend-store-size" i.e. --backend-store-size=4Gb. If not specified it defaults to 8Gb.

This option is avaiable for the following sub commands:

  • domain provision
  • domain join
  • domain dcpromo
  • drs clone-dc-database

LDB "batch_mode"

To improve performance during batch operations i.e. joins, ldb now accepts a "batch_mode" option. However to prevent any index or database inconsistencies if an operation fails, the entire transaction will be aborted at commit.

New LDB pack format

On first use (startup of 'samba' or the first transaction write) Samba's sam.ldb will be updated to a new more efficient pack format. This will take a few moments.

New LDB <= and >= index mode to improve replication performance

As well as a new pack format, Samba's sam.ldb uses a new index format allowing Samba to efficiently select objects changed since the last replication cycle. This in turn improves performance during replication of large domains.

LDB_Greater_than_and_Less_than_indexing

Improvements to ldb search performance

Search performance on large LDB databases has been improved by reducing memory allocations made on each object.

Improvements to subtree rename performance

Improvements have been made to Samba's handling of subtree renames, for example of containers and organisational units, however large renames are still not recommended.

CTDB changes

  • nfs-linux-kernel-callout now defaults to using systemd service names
The Red Hat service names continue to be the default.
Other distributions should patch this file when packaging it.
  • The onnode -o option has been removed
  • ctdbd logs when it is using more than 90% of a CPU thread
ctdbd is single threaded, so can become saturated if it uses the full capacity of a CPU thread. To help detect this situation, ctdbd now logs messages when CPU utilisation exceeds 90%. Each change in CPU utilisation over 90% is logged. A message is also logged when CPU utilisation drops below the 90% threshold.
  • Script configuration variable CTDB_MONITOR_SWAP_USAGE has been removed
05.system.script now monitors total memory (i.e. physical memory + swap) utilisation using the existing CTDB_MONITOR_MEMORY_USAGE script configuration variable.

CephFS Snapshot Integration


CephFS snapshots can now be exposed as previous file versions using the new ceph_snapshots VFS module. See the vfs_ceph_snapshots(8) man page for details.

REMOVED FEATURES

Web server

As a leftover from work related to the Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT), Samba still supported a Python WSGI web server (which could still be turned on from the 'server services' smb.conf parameter). This service was unused and has now been removed from Samba.

samba-tool join subdomain

The subdomain role has been removed from the join command. This option did not work and has no tests.

Python2 support

Samba 4.11 will not have any runtime support for Python 2.

If you are building Samba using the '--disable-python' option (i.e. you're excluding all the run-time Python support), then this will continue to work on a system that supports either python2 or python3.

To build Samba with python2 you *must* set the 'PYTHON' environment variable for both the 'configure' and 'make' steps, i.e.

  'PYTHON=python2 ./configure'
  'PYTHON=python2 make'

This will override the python3 default.

Except for this specific build-time use of python2, Samba now requires Python 3.4 as a minimum.


smb.conf changes

 Parameter Name                     Description                Default
 --------------                     -----------                -------
 allocation roundup size            Default changed/Deprecated 0
 client min protocol                Changed default            SMB2_02
 server min protocol                Changed default            SMB2_02
 mangled names                      Changed default            illegal
 web port                           Removed
 fruit:zero_file_id                 Changed default            False
 debug encryption                   New: dump encryption keys  False
 rndc command                       Deprecated
 lanman auth                        Deprecated
 encrypt passwords                  Deprecated

CHANGES SINCE 4.11.0rc4

CHANGES SINCE 4.11.0rc3

  • Douglas Bagnall <douglas.bagnall@catalyst.net.nz>
  • BUG #14049: ldb: Don't try to save a value that isn't there.
  • ldb_dn: Free dn components on explode failure.
  • ldb: Do not allow adding a DN as a base to itself.
  • Andrew Bartlett <abartlet@samba.org>
  • ldb: Release ldb 2.0.7.
  • BUG #13695: ldb: Correct Pigeonhole principle validation in ldb_filter_attrs().
  • BUG #14049: Fix ldb dn crash.
  • BUG #14117: Deprecate "lanman auth = yes" and "encrypt passwords = no".
  • Ralph Boehme <slow@samba.org>
  • BUG #14038: Fix compiling ctdb on older systems lacking POSIX robust mutexes.
  • BUG #14121: smbd returns bad File-ID on filehandle used to create a file or directory.
  • Poornima G <pgurusid@redhat.com>
  • BUG #14098: vfs_glusterfs: Use pthreadpool for scheduling aio operations.
  • Stefan Metzmacher <metze@samba.org>
  • BUG #14055: Add the target server name of SMB 3.1.1 connections as a hint to load balancers or servers with "multi-tenancy" support.
  • BUG #14113: Fix byte range locking bugs/regressions.
  • Swen Schillig <swen@linux.ibm.com>
  • ldb: Fix mem-leak if talloc_realloc fails.
  • Evgeny Sinelnikov <sin@altlinux.org>
  • BUG #14007: Fix join with don't exists machine account.
  • Martin Schwenke <martin@meltin.net>
  • BUG #14085: ctdb-recoverd: Only check for LMASTER nodes in the VNN map.

CHANGES SINCE 4.11.0rc2

  • Michael Adam <obnox@samba.org>
  • BUG #13972: Different Device Id for GlusterFS FUSE mount is causing data loss in CTDB cluster.
  • Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>
  • BUG #14035: CVE-2019-10197: Permissions check deny can allow user to escape from the share.
  • Andrew Bartlett <abartlet@samba.org>
  • BUG #14059: ldb: Release ldb 2.0.6 (log database repack so users know what is happening).
  • BUG #14092: docs: Deprecate "rndc command" for Samba 4.11.
  • Tim Beale <timbeale@catalyst.net.nz>
  • BUG #14059: ldb: Free memory when repacking database.
  • Ralph Boehme <slow@samba.org>
  • BUG #14089: vfs_default: Use correct flag in vfswrap_fs_file_id.
  • BUG #14090: vfs_glusterfs: Initialize st_ex_file_id, st_ex_itime and st_ex_iflags.
  • Anoop C S <anoopcs@redhat.com>
  • BUG #14093: vfs_glusterfs: Enable profiling for file system operations.
  • Aaron Haslett <aaronhaslett@catalyst.net.nz>
  • BUG #14059: Backport sambadowngradedatabase for v4.11.
  • Stefan Metzmacher <metze@samba.org>
  • BUG #14035: CVE-2019-10197: Permissions check deny can allow user to escape from the share.
  • Christof Schmitt <cs@samba.org>
  • BUG #14032: vfs_gpfs: Implement special case for denying owner access to ACL.
  • Martin Schwenke <martin@meltin.net>
  • BUG #14084: Avoid marking a node as connected before it can receive packets.
  • BUG #14086: Fix onnode test failure with ShellCheck >= 0.4.7.
  • BUG #14087: ctdb-daemon: Stop "ctdb stop" from completing before freezing databases.

KNOWN ISSUES

Release_Planning_for_Samba_4.11#Release_blocking_bugs Release blocking bugs
https://download.samba.org/pub/samba/rc/samba-4.11.0rc3.WHATSNEW.txt