Samba 3.0.0 Beta 3 [LWN.net]

The Beta 3 release of the open-source, Microsoft-compatible file and printer server software Samba, has been announced.

While we are significantly closer to the final release, you should be reminded that this is a non-production release provided for testing only. If all goes well, we will move onto a series of Release Candidate (RC) snapshots next.

The What's New document for this release has a quick summary of the changes: "There have been significant additions to winbindd's functionality in this release as well as changes to Samba's SID<->UNIX id mapping features."

A more detailed list of changes includes:

Active Directory support with LDAP/Kerberos authentication.
Unicode support and support for multi-byte character sets.
A rewritten, more configurable authentication system.
A new filename mangling system.
A new "net" command that is similar to the Windows equivalent.
NT style status32 code negotiation for better error handling.
Improved Windows 2000/XP/2003 printing capabilities.
Support for loadable RPC modules.
A faster dual-daemon winbindd process.
Support for migrating from Windows NT 4 domains to Samba domains.
Support for negotiating trust relations with NT 4 domain controllers.
Preliminary support for a distributed Winbind architecture.
Major documentation updates.

Despite the difficulties involved in reverse-engineering black-box software, the Samba development team continues to make major steps forward.

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