Samba Team Announces Samba 1.9.18
Canberra, Australia, January 1998 - The Samba Team is pleased to announce version 1.9.18 of Samba, the leading file and print server suite for corporate network integration with Microsoft Windows (tm) clients.
Speed and Internationalization Improvements.
With this release, Samba becomes one of the fastest available SMB/CIFS file servers, out-performing many commercial alternatives. Samba now implements the opportunistic locking features of the SMB/CIFS protocol. This can improve file access performance by an order of magnitude over previous versions. Samba has been internally benchmarked as faster than commercially available SMB servers on the same hardware platforms.
Samba now provides for dynamic code page support, allowing easy roll-out of servers within an international organization. Samba now allows network administrators to configure the way clients view internationalized filenames on a server-by-server basis.
Servers with multiple network interfaces are now fully supported by Samba in the same way as Microsoft Windows NT (tm) servers, allowing network administrators to easily load-balance client accesses over all available bandwidth.
Samba also provides automatic downloading of printer drivers for Microsoft Windows 95 (tm) clients, allowing it to completely replace Microsoft Windows NT servers for both file and printer services.
Samba has no client license fees, and may be used without cost on any compatible server operating system (most versions of UNIX).
Samba is the clear choice for robust, scalable, file and print services for Microsoft Windows clients and is used by thousands of corporations worldwide, as a mission-critical part of their networking infrastructure.
For a list of the companies that use Samba, open your browser on the URL:
http://anu.samba.org/samba/survey/
To purchase commercial support for Samba, open your browser on the URL:
ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/Support.txt
About the Samba File and Print Server program.
Designed to service any Server Message Block (SMB) file sharing client, Samba is compatible with all Microsoft Networking clients including Windows 95 (tm), Windows NT (tm) Workstation and Server, Windows for Workgroups (tm), IBM OS/2 (tm), smbfs for Linux and Thursby Software Systems DAVE (tm) Macintosh SMB client.
Samba also functions as a logon server for Windows 95 and supports roving profiles. Samba can provide support for over 2,000 clients simultaneously per samba server and many Samba servers of this scale can work together.
Samba is distinguished by its scalability, speed and flexibility. It is freely distributed with source code, and has high-quality support. Over a hundred specialist support companies worldwide offer commercial support for Samba, which is also supported by copious Internet resources and a mailing list with ten thousand subscribers.
Samba is developed by a team of international developers, in the same manner as the Linux operating system, and is shipped as standard with most versions of Linux.
With many hundreds of thousands of installed systems around the world, Samba is making it possible for many kinds of systems to share files that have been incompatible until now.
Samba implements the Common Internet Filesystem protocol, the Internet Engineering Task Force draft protocol for extending SMB to the Internet. Samba keeps pace with CIFS developments. See
http://anu.samba.org/cifs.
Samba runs on UNIX (tm) and near clones from over 30 vendors, besides IBM MVS (tm), Digital Equipment VMS (tm), Stratos VOS (tm), all versions of IBM OS/2 Warp (tm), Novell Netware (tm), Amiga OS (tm) and others. Most corporate data servers are supported, besides countless small networks running less powerful operating systems.
Windows NT, Windows 95, Linux, OS/2 Warp, Windows for Workgroups come with SMB network file systems by default. Windows 3.1, DOS, AIX and others have equivalent add-ons. Different SMB clients have different extensions and different bugs. Samba goes to great lengths to accommodate all clients that are in use.
More Information and Downloading
For more information on Samba see
http://samba.org/
Demand for Samba is very high. For a faster download and to minimize Internet traffic over the period following this release, please use a Samba mirror site. The list of mirror sites is contained in
ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/MIRRORS.txt.
The official master ftp location is
ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/samba-latest.tar.gz
Some of the products mentioned in this document are registered trademarks of other companies. The samba-bugs@samba.org address referred to in this release should not be used for general enquiries or support requests. See the web pages for information about the general Samba mailing list and a listing of commercial support providers.
Thanks
This release of Samba was made possible with the generous help of the following companies :
Please note that this does not imply endorsement of Samba by the above named companies.
Samba Team members
The Samba Team are :
Copying
Unrestricted reproduction rights of this press release are granted, so long as it remains clear that:
This is a new major stable release and contains new functionality
It is recommended that all production server systems upgrade to
this release.
The release may be downloaded from the URL :
ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/samba-1.9.18.tar.gz
The release notes follow.
Regards,
Samba Team.
------------------------------------------------------------
WHATS NEW IN 1.9.18 - January 7th 1998.
=======================================
This is the latest stable release of Samba. This is the
version that all production Samba servers should be running
for all current bug-fixes.
This release contains several major changes and much re-written
code.
The main changes are :
1). Oplock support now operational.
-----------------------------------
Samba now supports 'exclusive' and 'batch' oplocks.
These are an advanced networked file system feature
that allows clients to obtain a exclusive use of a
file. This allows a client to cache any changes it
makes locally, and greatly improves performance.
Windows NT has this feature and prior to this
release this was one of the reasons Windows NT
could be faster in some situations. Samba has
now been benchmarked as out performing Windows
NT on equivalently priced hardware.
The oplock code in Samba has been extensively
tested and is believed to be completely stable.
Please report any problems to the samba-bugs alias.
2). NetBIOS name daemon re-written.
-----------------------------------
The old nmbd that has caused some users problems
has now been completely re-written and now is
much easier to maintain and add changes to.
Changes include support for multi-homed hosts
in the same way as an NT Server with multiple
IP interfaces behaves (registers with the WINS
server as a multi-homed name type), and also
support for multi-homed name registration in
the Samba WINS server. Another added feature
is robustness in the face of WINS server failure,
nmbd will now keep trying to contact the WINS
server until it is successful, in the same
way as an NT Server.
Also in this release is an implementation
of the Lanman announce protocol used by
OS/2 clients. Thanks to Jacco de Leeuw for
this code.
3). New Internationalization support.
-------------------------------------
With this release Samba no longer needs to be
separately compiled for Japanese (Kanji) support,
the same binary will serve both Kanji and non-Kanji
clients.
A new method of dynamically loading client code pages
has been added to allow the case insensitivity to
be done dependent on the code page of the client.
Note that Samba still will only handle one client
code page at a time. This will be fixed when
Samba is fully UNICODE enabled.
Please see the new man page for make_smbcodepage
for details on adding additional client code page
support.
4). New Printing support.
-------------------------
An implementation of the Windows 95 automatic printer
driver installation has been added to smbd. To use this
new feature please read the document:
docs/PRINTER_DRIVER.txt
Thanks to Jean-Francois Micouleau, and also Herb Lewis
of Silicon Graphics for this new code.
Printer support on System V systems (notably Solaris)
has been improved with the addition of code generously
donated by Norm Jacobs of Sun Microsystems. Sun have
also made a Solaris SPARC workstation available to the
Samba Team to aid in their porting efforts.
Changed code.
-------------
Samba no longer needs the libdes library to support
encrypted passwords. Samba now contains a restricted
version of DES that can only be used for authentication
purposes (to comply with the USA export encryption
regulations and to allow USA Mirror sites to carry
Samba source code). The 'encrypt passwords' parameter
may now be used without recompiling.
Much of the internals of Samba has been re-structured
to support the oplock and Domain controller changes.
Samba now contains an implementation of share modes
using System V shared memory as well as the mmap()
based code. This was done to allow the 'FAST_SHARE_MODES'
to be used on more systems (especially HPUX 9.x) that
have System V shared memory, but not the mmap() call.
The System V shared memory code is used by default on
many systems as it has benchmarked as faster on many
systems.
The Automount code has been slightly re-shuffled, such
that the home directory (and profile location) can be
specified by \\%N\homes and \\%N\homes\profiles
respectively, which are the defaults for these values.
If -DAUTOMOUNT is enabled, then %N is the server
component of the user's NIS auto.home entry. Obviously,
you will need to be running Samba on the user's home
server as well as the one they just logged in on.
The RPC Domain code has been moved into a separate directory
rpc_pipe/, and a LGPL License issued specifically for code
in this directory. This is so that people can use this
code in other projects.
Missing feature.
----------------
One feature that we wanted to get into this release
that was not possible due to the re-write of the nmbd
code was the scalability features in the Samba WINS server.
This feature is now tentatively scheduled for the next
release (1.9.19). Apologies to anyone who was hoping
for this feature to be included. The nmbd re-write
will make it much easier to add such things in future.
New parameters in smb.conf.
---------------------------
New Global parameters.
----------------------
Documented in the smb.conf man pages :
"bind interfaces only"
"lm announce"
"lm interval"
"logon drive"
"logon home"
"min wins ttl"
"max wins ttl"
"username level"
New Share level parameters.
---------------------------
Documented in the smb.conf man pages :
"delete veto files"
"oplocks"
Nascent web interface for configuration.
----------------------------------------
source/wsmbconf.c is a cgi-bin program for editing smb.conf. It can
also be run standalone. This is in a very early stage of development.
Debugging support.
------------------
smbd and nmbd will now modify their debug log level when
they receive a USR1 signal (increase debug level by one)
and USR2 signal (decrease debug level by one). This has
been added to aid administrators track down faults that
only occur after long periods of time, or transiently.
Reporting bugs.
---------------
If you have problems, or think you have found a
bug please email a report to :
samba-bugs@samba.org
Please state the version number of Samba that
you are running, and *full details* of the steps
we need to reproduce the problem.
As always, all bugs are our responsibility.
Regards,
The Samba Team.