Samba 3.5 release includes experimental SMB2 support

The Samba project has released version 3.5 of its open source SMB protocol implementation. Major changes include implementation of SMB2 (used in Windows Vista and Windows 7) and support for Windows' 100 ns resolution timestamps, where supported by the kernel and system libraries. The 100ns resolution timestamps will therefore work with Linux kernels later than 2.6.22 using glibc 2.6 or later.

The SMB2 support is experimental and requires the addition of "max protocol = smb2" to Samba's configuration to enable it. The new version can carry out encrypted communication with CUPS printer servers, although the default is still set to unencrypted. It can also cache Winbind credentials, so that SMB access via, for example, the Nautilus file manager, no longer requires multiple log-ins. Caching is enabled by default, but can be disabled on a per-application basis by setting the LIBSMBCLIENT_NO_CCACHE environment variable.

There is also a new 'scannedonly' VFS module which communicates with anti-virus software to ensure that users are only able to access files which have been checked and found to be above suspicion. Another minor change is the removal of the Using Samba HTML book from the "tarball" distribution, although the book is still available online. Samba source code is licensed under the GPLv2 and is, of course, available to download.

(djwm)