06 July 2009, 16:14

Samba 3.4 includes Samba 4

Hot on the heels of the most recent security update for version 3.3.6, the development team behind open source file and print server Samba have released version 3.4. The release features several changes and major enhancement to various parts of Samba, including printing and authentication.

A major point of interest, however, is the fact that Samba 3.4 includes the source code for version 4.0, which has yet to have an official release date set. By default though, only the Samba 3.4 code is compiled; if, however, the '--enable-merged-build' option is set, the Samba 4 source code in the 'source4' folder will also be compiled. The Samba3 and Samba4 daemons run in parallel and share tasks, with Samba3 dealing with SMB ports and Samba4 taking care of Kerberos, LDAP and WINS.

'tdbsam' replaces 'smbpasswd' as the default account database in Samba 3.4 (smb.conf option: passwd backend). To ensure this does not give rise to any problems, users will need to modify their configuration or convert existing user data. More details about the release can be found in the Samba 3.4.0 changelog.

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