Author: abartlet Date: 2007-05-31 05:05:07 +0000 (Thu, 31 May 2007) New Revision: 23260
WebSVN: http://websvn.samba.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi?view=rev&root=samba&rev=23260 Log: A first attempt at a WHATSNEW for Samba4 TP5 Andrew Bartlett Modified: branches/SAMBA_4_0_RELEASE/WHATSNEW.txt Changeset: Modified: branches/SAMBA_4_0_RELEASE/WHATSNEW.txt =================================================================== --- branches/SAMBA_4_0_RELEASE/WHATSNEW.txt 2007-05-31 03:34:06 UTC (rev 23259) +++ branches/SAMBA_4_0_RELEASE/WHATSNEW.txt 2007-05-31 05:05:07 UTC (rev 23260) @@ -1,70 +1,50 @@ -'Samba4 TP4' presents you with an opportunity to see a Technology -Preview (TP) snapshot of Samba4's development, as at January 2007. +'Samba4 TP5' presents you with a snapshot into Samba4's ongoing +development, as we move towards our first alpha releases. This Technology +Preview (TP) is snapshot of Samba4's development, as at June 2007. -In the last few months since TP3 was released in October 2006, -significant work has been done across many parts of Samba4. Since that -time, we have added the basis for some new and exciting features: +In the time since TP4 was released in January 2007, Samba has +continued to evolve, but you may particularly notice these areas: - PKINIT support to Samba4's KDC will allow, smart-card login to a - Samba4 domain. TP4 demonstrates this with static key files, but - work will continue to enable actual hardware cards. + Work has continued on SWAT, the the libnet API behind it. These we + hope will grow into a full web-based management solution for both + local and remote Samba and windows servers. - Clustering support was always a design goal of Samba4, and with TP4 - we have the ctdb framework, a cluster-aware shared database. This - allows Samba4 to share a shared cluster file-system with it's clients. - Presented at this year's linux.conf.au, including a highly rigged - demo, you can expect to see this mature over the next few months. + The DRAUAPI research effort has largely concluded, and an initial + implementation of AD replication is present, included in torture + test-cases. This includes the decryption of the AD passwords, which + were specially and separately encrypted. This should be recognised + as vital milestone. - Non-blocking and Asynchronous IO support, has always been a design - goal in Samba4, and TP4 will use new Linux Kernel features to - implement event driven asynchronous IO. This makes Samba more - efficient on systems where some data may be 'further away' than a - local disk, such as HSM systems. This allows the Kernel to handle - reading the returned data from the disk, only notifying Samba when - the data is ready for dispatch to the client. + Likewise, the LDAP Backend project has moved from a research + implementation into something that can be easily deployed outside + the test infrastructure. - Our web-management console, known as SWAT, is being revamped, and in - TP4 you can find a new Web 2.0 style user interface, being used to - support a web-based ldb browser. We hope this new system will allow - things simple not possible with the form-submit style of web - management. + Testing has been an area of great work, with renewed vigour to + increase our test coverage over the past few months. In doing so, + we now demonstrate PKINIT and many other aspects of kerberos, as + well as command-line authentication handling in our testsuite. - Using LDB LDAP back-end integration has improved in this release, with an - improved mapping module allowing the start of Fedora DS back-end - support. + The testsuite infrastructure has been rewritten in perl and + extended, to setup multiple environments: allowing testing of the + domain member, as well as the domain controller, roles. Samba4's + initial implementation of winbind has been revived, to fill in these + tests. -In continuing our research effort, TP4 includes the work to better -understand and implement the DRSUAPI replication protocols. By better -understanding the needs of replication now, we can structure our -databases so that their format will have to change less in future. + In clustering, work on CTDB (an implementation of a clustered Samba) + has moved ahead very well, but the current code has not + been merged into Samba4 in time for this release. -We hope to use this replication function to replace the SamSync based -Vampire process so effectively demonstrated since TP1, and to -eventually join an Active Directory domain, as a replicating partner. + To support better management, we have investigated group policy + support, and include the infrastructure required. Unfortunately + without MMC write support, you will need to place the polices into + the directory by hand. -Behind the scenes, much of the core infrastructure of Samba4 continues -development: +As we move forward, we have many of the features we feel are required +for a Samba4 Alpha. Similarly, we know enough about the data +formats (particularly those that are encrypted) to be confident that +we won't need to change the LDB format. Our plan is to publish a +Samba4 alpha in the next few months. - In Kerberos, we have continued to track the development of the - Heimdal Kerberos implementation, and reduce the custom diff between - our branch and upstream. Heimdal now provides plug-in APIs for - almost all of the hooks we need, including management and validation - of the PAC. - - In testing, our test infrastructure has undergone a quiet - revolution, as we improve our unit test framework. Likewise, the - tests themselves have continued to expand, as we follow our - test-driven development pattern. - - In providing an abstraction above our raw RPC layer, the libnet - library continues to expand, becoming a C and JS management API for - Samba4 and remote servers. - - To ensure that, as an administrator and developer, you can easily - read and edit our internal databases, our LDB layer has been - optimised for speed. The aim here is to avoid needing to use the faster, but - more opaque, TDB layer. - These are just some of the highlights of the work done in the past few months. More details can be found in our SVN history.
