Samba Team Releases Version 3.6

August 9th 2011.

The Samba Team is proud to announce the release of Samba 3.6, a major new release of the award-winning Free Software file, print and authentication server suite for Microsoft Windows® clients.

The First Free Software SMB2 Server

Samba 3.6 includes the first Free Software implementation of Microsoft's new SMB2 file serving protocol. SMB2 within Samba is implemented with a brand new asynchronous server architecture, allowing Samba to display the performance enhancements SMB2 brings to Microsoft networking technology.

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 Microsoft Windows 7® clients.

Future developments of our SMB2 server and client suite, in combination with our expanding number of SMB2 tests, will keep driving the performance improvements and improved compatibility with Microsoft Windows that Samba users have come to expect from our software.

Improved Printing Support

The Samba 3.6 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.

Improved Clustered File Server Support

Building on our success as the first commercial implementation of a clustered SMB/CIFS server, Samba 3.6 provides industry-leading scalability and performance as a clustered SMB2/SMB/CIFS file server, using our "clustered tdb" (ctdb) technology - also available as Free Software.

Written and tested to be compatible with most clustered file systems, both Free Software and proprietary, Samba 3.6 with ctdb provides a scalable clustered file server solution with full Windows file sharing semantics.

Samba and ctdb has been shipped in production file serving products for many years, to some of the most demanding customers in the world.

Simplified Identity Mapping

Samba 3.6 has simplified the complex field of mapping Linux® and UNIX® identities to Windows users and groups. Samba 3.6 contains a new implementation of the identity mapping code which allows automatic allocation of Linux and UNIX identities when Windows clients connect to a Samba server, even in a clustered file serving configuration.

Greater Reliability

Samba 3.6 has been tested using our widely accepted smbtorture test suite, created by the Samba Team to test Samba itself and now used by most of the companies writing SMB2/SMB/CIFS file server software to test their own products.

In addition, Samba is one of eleven open source projects that leading software integrity vendor Coverity has certified as "secure" and has reached Coverity "Integrity Rung 2" certification.

Library Components

As the Samba software matures, technologies created for use within Samba have been spun-off as external libraries, available from the following Web addresses:

• Talloc

  Hierarchical memory allocator.

• TDB

  Super-fast key/value pair transactional database.

• Clustered TDB

  A cluster-aware version of tdb and the code behind all Samba clustered file serving implementations.

• LDB

  High performance LDAP-style database access for applications.

• Tevent

  Asynchronous Event subsystem, the basis for the new SMB2 server implementation within Samba 3.6.

These libraries have been adopted by other Free Software projects, showcasing Samba as one of the leading innovators in the Free Software community.

A Modular Toolbox For OEM Vendor Needs

As Free Software, Samba 3.6 is the ideal choice for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to use for their file, print and authentication products. It is easily integrated into a whole host of different tasks, and can be customized at will by the vendor to satisfy their needs.

In addition, Samba 3.6 includes a modular "Virtual File System" (VFS) interface that vendors can use to quickly and efficiently customize Samba to take advantage of any specific features of their underlying technology without having to modify any of the core Samba code. From advanced file systems to network traffic analysis, the Samba VFS layer allows external code to be easily integrated with Samba. Example modules are provided as source code for vendors to customize as they wish.

Samba is the leading choice for Microsoft Windows® connectivity

Samba is the leading technology choice for Windows file serving on Linux and UNIX platforms and in embedded Network Attached Storage (NAS) solutions. Samba is used by vendors selling NAS solutions ranging from high end clustered business-critical systems, to low end consumer devices, and everything in between. Samba is fully IPv6 enabled and meets all mandates for modern network interoperability.

Commercial support is available for Samba from many different vendors.

Getting Samba 3.6

Samba 3.6 source code is available now from the Samba Web site.

The uncompressed tarballs and patch files have been signed using GnuPG (ID 6568B7EA). The source code can be downloaded now. See the release notes for more information.

About the Samba Team

The Samba Team is a worldwide group of computer professionals working together via the Internet to produce the highest quality Free Software Windows (SMB2/SMB/CIFS) server and client software. We are the undisputed experts in providing interoperability with computers running Microsoft Windows. Members of the Samba Team work for many of the largest companies in the software Industry and even helped Microsoft produce the protocol documentation that fully specifies the SMB/CIFS protocol.