Samba 4 status report

The Samba 4 talk was the next up. Waiting for the talk to begin, I saw my first ?blue badge? ? a proper reporter type, from the local paper. Quite cool to see the local media taking an interest; especially cool when the TV cameras showed up in the link.

On to the talk itself, Samba 4 sounds like it will be quite an interesting beast. Somewhat incredibly, it?s going to be including a Kerberos server, an LDAP server, a Javascript engine, and a pony. Well, not the pony, but the rest?s going to be included; however there are good reasons for this, so don?t worry too much.

The advantages of integrating the additional servers is that the configuration of Samba with LDAP/Kerberos is going to be much easier; the intension is that it should work out of the box. There?s also the advantage that they don?t have to write patches against, say, OpenLDAP to break it in the ways Microsoft broke their implementation. That said, the Samba guys have kept the ability to use stand?alone servers if you prefer.

The embedded Javascript engine?s a slightly different story. The web administration interface has been redone, using all sorts of hip AJAX magic. Javascript objects are passed between the client and the server, and you end up with an interface that really rocks. The interface is also significantly more powerful: the objective here was to make an interface that Samba developers would want to use, so they?d have some incentive to improve it. Overall, it looks like you should be able to use the web administration interface to achieve much more.

The other nice thing about the web interface is that it has a sane approach to SSL. If you try and access it on a via HTTP rather than HTTPS, it bounces you to a secure connection. This is sensible, but not as sensible as what it does with certificates. If, when it starts up, it finds that it doesn't have any SSL certificates, it will create its own self?signed ones.

To go with the talk, the Samba team has very nicely provided the world with a technology preview so we can see where they?re going. It?s not very complete at the moment (notably, printing doesn?t work) but should be worth a play. One special treat: an initial stab at SMB2 client support, the new (and naturally, completely undocumented) protocol in Vista. You can get it at http://us2.samba.org/samba/news/#4.0.0tp1