Samba 4.12 Features added/changed

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Samba 4.12.0

Release Notes for Samba 4.12.0
March 03, 2020

Release Announcements

This is the first stable release of the Samba 4.12 release series.

Please read the release notes carefully before upgrading.

NEW FEATURES/CHANGES

Python 3.5 Required

Samba's minimum runtime requirement for python was raised to Python 3.4 with samba 4.11. Samba 4.12 raises this minimum version to Python 3.5 both to access new features and because this is the oldest version we test with in our CI infrastructure.

(Build time support for the file server with Python 2.6 has not changed)

Removing in-tree cryptography: GnuTLS 3.4.7 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 3.4.7 to be installed (including development headers at build time) for all configurations, not just the Samba AD DC.

Thanks to this work Samba no longer ships an in-tree DES implementation and on GnuTLS 3.6.5 or later Samba will include no in-tree cryptography other than the MD4 hash and that implemented in our copy of Heimdal.

Using GnuTLS for SMB3 encryption you will notice huge performance and copy speed improvements. Tests with the CIFS Kernel client from Linux Kernel 5.3 show a 3x speed improvement for writing and a 2.5x speed improvement for reads!

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operate in many still common situations if this system-wide parameter is in effect, as many of our protocols rely on outdated cryptography.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.

zlib library is now required to build Samba

Samba no longer includes a local copy of zlib in our source tarball. By removing this we do not need to ship (even where we did not build) the old, broken zip encryption code found there.

New Spotlight backend for Elasticsearch

Support for the macOS specific Spotlight search protocol has been enhanced significantly. Starting with 4.12 Samba supports using Elasticsearch as search backend. Various new parameters have been added to configure this:

 spotlight backend = noindex | elasticsearch | tracker
 elasticsearch:address = ADDRESS
 elasticsearch:port = PORT
 elasticsearch:use tls = BOOLEAN
 elasticsearch:index = INDEXNAME
 elasticsearch:mappings = PATH
 elasticsearch:max results = NUMBER

Samba also ships a Spotlight client command "mdfind" which can be used to search any SMB server that runs the Spotlight RPC service. See the manpage of mdfind for details.

Note that when upgrading existing installations that are using the previous default Spotlight backend Gnome Tracker must explicitly set "spotlight backend = tracker" as the new default is "noindex".

"net ads kerberos pac save" and "net eventlog export"

The "net ads kerberos pac save" and "net eventlog export" tools will no longer silently overwrite an existing file during data export. If the filename given exits, an error will be shown.

Fuzzing

A large number of fuzz targets have been added to Samba, and Samba has been registered in Google's oss-fuzz cloud fuzzing service. In particular, we now have good fuzzing coverage of our generated NDR parsing code.

A large number of issues have been found and fixed thanks to this effort.

'samba-tool' improvements add contacts as member to groups

Previously 'samba-tool group addmemers' can just add users, groups and computers as members to groups. But also contacts can be members of groups. Samba 4.12 adds the functionality to add contacts to groups. Since contacts have no sAMAccountName, it's possible that there are more than one contact with the same name in different organizational units. Therefore it's necessary to have an option to handle group members by their DN.

To get the DN of an object there is now the "--full-dn" option available for all necessary commands.

The MS Windows UI allows to search for specific types of group members when searching for new members for a group. This feature is included here with the new samba-tool group addmembers "--object-type=OBJECTYPE" option. The different types are selected accordingly to the Windows UI. The default samba-toole behaviour shouldn't be changed.

Allow filtering by OU or subtree in samba-tool

A new "--base-dn" and "--member-base-dn" option is added to relevant samba-tool user, group and ou management commands to allow operation on just one part of the AD tree, such as a single OU.

VFS

SMB_VFS_NTIMES

Samba now uses a sentinel value based on utimensat(2) UTIME_OMIT to denote to-be-ignored timestamp variables passed to the SMB_VFS_NTIMES() VFS function.

VFS modules can check whether any of the time values inside a struct smb_file_time is to be ignored by calling is_omit_timespec() on the value.

'io_uring' vfs module

The module makes use of the new io_uring infrastructure (intruduced in Linux 5.1), see https://lwn.net/Articles/776703/

Currently this implements SMB_VFS_{PREAD,PWRITE,FSYNC}_SEND/RECV and avoids the overhead of the userspace threadpool in the default vfs backend. See also vfs_io_uring(8).

In order to build the module you need the liburing userspace library and its developement headers installed, see https://git.kernel.dk/cgit/liburing/

At runtime you'll need a Linux kernel with version 5.1 or higher. Note that 5.4.14 and 5.4.15 have a regression that breaks the Samba module! The regression was fixed in Linux 5.4.16 again.

MS-DFS changes in the VFS

This release changes set getting and setting of MS-DFS redirects on the filesystem to go through two new VFS functions:

SMB_VFS_CREATE_DFS_PATHAT()
SMB_VFS_READ_DFS_PATHAT()

instead of smbd explicitly storing MS-DFS redirects inside symbolic links on the filesystem. The underlying default implementations of this has not changed, the redirects are still stored inside symbolic links on the filesystem, but moving the creation and reading of these links into the VFS as first-class functions now allows alternate methods of storing them (maybe in extended attributes) for OEMs who don't want to mis-use filesystem symbolic links in this way.

CTDB changes

  • The ctdb_mutex_fcntl_helper periodically re-checks the lock file
The re-check period is specified using a 2nd argument to this helper. The default re-check period is 5s.
If the file no longer exists or the inode number changes then the helper exits. This triggers an election.

REMOVED FEATURES

smb.conf "write cache size"

The smb.conf parameter "write cache size" has been removed.

Since the in-memory write caching code was written, our write path has changed significantly. In particular we have gained very flexible support for async I/O, with the new linux io_uring interface in development. The old write cache concept which cached data in main memory followed by a blocking pwrite no longer gives any improvement on modern systems, and may make performance worse on memory-contrained systems, so this functionality should not be enabled in core smbd code.

In addition, it complicated the write code, which is a performance critical code path.

If required for specialist purposes, it can be recreated as a VFS module.

Retiring DES encryption types in Kerberos.

With this release, support for DES encryption types has been removed from Samba, and setting DES_ONLY flag for an account will cause Kerberos authentication to fail for that account (see RFC-6649).

Samba-DC: DES keys no longer saved in DB.=

When a new password is set for an account, Samba DC will store random keys in DB instead of DES keys derived from the password. If the account is being migrated to Windbows or to an older version of Samba in order to use DES keys, the password must be reset to make it work.

Heimdal-DC: removal of weak-crypto.

Following removal of DES encryption types from Samba, the embedded Heimdal build has been updated to not compile weak crypto code (HEIM_WEAK_CRYPTO).

vfs_netatalk: The netatalk VFS module has been removed.

The netatalk VFS module has been removed. It was unmaintained and is not needed any more.

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 removes the 'rndc command' smb.conf parameter, which supported this configuration by writing out a list of DCs permitted to make changes to the DNS Zone and nudging the 'named' server if a new DC was added to the domain. Administrators using BIND9_FLATFILE will need to maintain this manually from now on.


smb.conf changes

 Parameter Name                     Description                Default
 --------------                     -----------                -------
 elasticsearch:address              New                        localhost
 elasticsearch:port                 New                        9200
 elasticsearch:use tls              New                        No
 elasticsearch:index                New                        _all
 elasticsearch:mappings             New                        DATADIR/elasticsearch_mappings.json
 elasticsearch:max results          New                        100
 nfs4:acedup                        Changed default            merge
 rndc command                       Removed
 write cache size                   Removed
 spotlight backend		     New			noindex


CHANGES SINCE 4.12.0rc4

  • Andrew Bartlett <abartlet@samba.org>
  • BUG #14258: dsdb: Correctly handle memory in objectclass_attrs.

CHANGES SINCE 4.12.0rc3

  • Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>
  • BUG #14269: s3: DFS: Don't allow link deletion on a read-only share.
  • Douglas Bagnall <douglas.bagnall@catalyst.net.nz>
  • BUG #14284: pidl/wscript: configure should insist on Parse::Yapp::Driver.
  • Andrew Bartlett <abartlet@samba.org>
  • BUG #14270: ldb: Fix search with scope ONE and small result sets.
  • BUG #14284: build: Do not check if system perl modules should be bundled.
  • Volker Lendecke <vl@samba.org>
  • BUG #14285: smbd fails to handle EINTR from open(2) properly.
  • Stefan Metzmacher <metze@samba.org>

CHANGES SINCE 4.12.0rc2

  • Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>
  • BUG #14282: Set getting and setting of MS-DFS redirects on the filesystem to go through two new VFS functions SMB_VFS_CREATE_DFS_PATHAT() and SMB_VFS_READ_DFS_PATHAT().
  • Andrew Bartlett <abartlet@samba.org>
  • BUG #14255: bootstrap: Remove un-used dependency python3-crypto.
  • Volker Lendecke <vl@samba.org>
  • BUG #14247: Fix CID 1458418 and 1458420.
  • BUG #14281: lib: Fix a shutdown crash with "clustering = yes".
  • Stefan Metzmacher <metze@samba.org>
  • BUG #14247: Winbind member (source3) fails local SAM auth with empty domain name.
  • BUG #14265: winbindd: Handle missing idmap in getgrgid().
  • BUG #14271: Don't use forward declaration for GnuTLS typedefs.
  • BUG #14280: Add io_uring vfs module.
  • Andreas Schneider <asn@samba.org>
  • BUG #14250: libcli:smb: Improve check for gnutls_aead_cipher_(en|de)cryptv2.


CHANGES SINCE 4.12.0rc1

  • Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>
  • BUG #14239: s3: lib: nmblib. Clean up and harden nmb packet processing.
  • Andreas Schneider <asn@samba.org>
  • BUG #14253: lib:util: Log mkdir error on correct debug levels.

KNOWN ISSUES

Release_Planning_for_Samba_4.12#Release_blocking_bugs

 https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.12.0.html