Samba 3.6.0 released

The final version of Samba 3.6.0 has been announced by the developers of the free software implementation of Microsoft's SMB protocol. The highlight of the Samba 3.6 features is support for SMB2, the protocol used by Vista; SMB2.1 is used by Windows 7.

This is the first release where the developers consider the implementation of the SMB2 protocol to be fully featured, though the release notes say that modification of user quotas using the Windows quota management tools will not work. The developers are not enabling SMB2 by default as it is a first release, but will encourage users and OEMs to turn it on, test it and report their results; this way they can be confident that the implementation is robust and they can enable it by default in a future release.

The Samba developers have introduced an Endpoint Mapper, described as "like a DNS server for ports" as Microsoft has become more reliant on using an endpoint mapper. This though, like SMB2, will not be enabled by default, as it needs more testing.

Samba 3.6.0 also sees rewritten spooling and printing code for better conformance to "the spec" and easier internal testing. SMBTA (SMB Traffic Analyser has been added to allow users to monitor and create statistics on their SMB servers. Samba will also now send correct disk-free information on shares of NFS imported directories on Linux, thanks to a new NFS quota backend based on the Solaris/FreeBSD version.

Full details of these and other changes are included in the release notes. Source for Samba 3.6.0 can be downloaded(direct download/signatures). A patch for Samba 3.5.11 source is also available(direct download). Samba is licensed under the GPLv3.

(djwm)