Enterprise open source Toolkit

Samba 4 moves closer to production

Renai LeMay ZDNet Australia

Published: 24 Mar 2006 10:35 GMT

A second test version of the next generation of Samba has been released to the public, with numerous bug fixes and improvements included.

Samba is open source software that lets Windows files and printers be shared by Unix and Linux systems.

"We have just uploaded the second technology preview of Samba 4," Samba developer Jelmer Vernooij said in an email announcing the update on Thursday. The first preview of Samba 4 — which mainly seeks to add support for Microsoft's Active Directory protocols — was released in January.

Vernooij said the second test version of Samba 4 was aimed at "allowing users, managers and developers to see how we have progressed and to invite feedback and support".

The development team has made more than 80 modifications to the software since the initial release, including better internal APIs and code quality in Samba's client-side application.

However, the team warned against production use of the software at this stage. "We recommend against upgrading any production servers from Samba 3 to Samba 4 at this stage," it said in release notes for the software. "If you are upgrading an experimental server, you should back up all configuration and data... Samba 4 technology preview is not secure."

The upgraded Samba software can be downloaded here.

Renai LeMay reported from Sydney for ZDNet Australia. For more ZDNet Australia stories, click here.