New Samba release ready for download

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 10 August 2011 10:13

Business IT - Open Source

For its developers, Samba 4 is the holy grail. When they make that release, they would be able to offer businesses, 80 per cent of whom use Active Directory for authentication, the freedom to choose a non-Windows server environment and yet enjoy all the benefits of Active Directory.

The team is one step closer to that goal with the release yesterday of Samba 3.6.

Samba is an award-winning free software file, print and authentication server suite for Windows clients. Yesterday's release includes the first free software implementation of Microsoft's new SMB2 file-serving protocol.

SMB2 is Microsoft's replacement for their SMB (Server Message Block) or CIFS (Common Internet File System) protocol. SMB2 is an updated and simpler version of SMB/CIFS, with modern concepts for dealing with high latency (WAN) links and for high performance (gigabit+) speed networks, well-known Samba developer Jeremy Allison told iTWire.

"Within Samba, SMB2 is implemented with a brand new asynchronous server architecture, allowing Samba to display the performance enhancements SMB2 brings to Microsoft networking technology," he said in a media release.

"Samba's new SMB2 server has been tested by major vendors and has been able to double the performance of some network applications when run in conjunction with Windows 7 clients."

Samba 3.6 also has much better support for printing. The print subsystem has been completely re-written to use automatically generated remote procedure calls (RPC) and provides greater compatibility with the Windows SPOOLSS print subsystem architecture, including export of printer data via registry interfaces.

"Samba 3.6 is the first 'on the wire' compatible version of the Microsoft SPOOLSS printing subsystem, and is the basis for our ongoing work to create an implementation of Microsoft Windows printing available separately from the Samba file server," Allison said.