1.6 What s New in Samba 2.2?

1.6 What's New in Samba 2.2?

In Version 2.2, Samba has more advanced support for Windows networking, including the ability to perform the more important tasks necessary for acting in a Windows NT domain. In addition, Samba 2.2 has some support for technologies that Microsoft introduced in Windows 2000, although the Samba team has saved Active Directory support for Version 3.0.

1.6.1 PDC Support for Windows 2000/XP Clients

Samba previously could act as a PDC to authenticate Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT 4 systems. This functionality has been extended in Release 2.2 to include Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Thus, it is possible to have a Samba server supporting domain logons for a network of Windows clients, including the most recent releases from Microsoft. This can result in a very stable, high-performance, and more secure network, and gives you the added benefit of not having to purchase per-seat Windows CALs from Microsoft.

1.6.2 Microsoft Dfs Support

Microsoft Dfs allows shared resources that are dispersed among a number of servers in the network to be gathered together and appear to users as if they all exist in a single directory tree on one server. This method of organization makes life much simpler for users. Instead of having to browse around the network on a treasure hunt to locate the resource they want to use, they can go directly to the Dfs server and grab what they want. Samba 2.2 offers support for serving Dfs, so a Windows server is no longer needed for this purpose.

1.6.3 Windows NT/2000/XP Printing Support

Windows NT/2000/XP has a different Remote Procedure Call (RPC)-based printer interface than Windows 95/98/Me does. In Samba 2.2, the Windows NT/2000/XP interface is supported. Along with this, the Samba team has been adding support for automatically downloading the printer driver from the Samba server while adding a new printer to a Windows client.

1.6.4 ACLs

Samba now supports ACLs on its Unix host for Unix variants that support them. The list includes Solaris 2.6, 7, and 8, Irix, AIX, Linux (with either the ACL patch for the ext2/ext3 filesystem from http://acl.bestbits.at or when using the XFS filesystem), and FreeBSD (Version 5.0 and later). When using ACL support, Samba translates between Unix ACLs and Windows NT/2000/XP ACLs, making the Samba host look and act more like a Windows NT/2000/XP server from the point of view of Windows clients.

1.6.5 Support for Windows Client Administration Tools

Windows comes with tools that can be used from a client to manage shared resources remotely on a Windows server. Samba 2.2 allows these tools to operate on shares on the Samba server as well.

1.6.6 Integration with Winbind

Winbind is a facility that allows users whose account information is stored in a Windows domain database to authenticate on a Unix system. The result is a unified logon environment, in which a user account can be kept on either the Unix system or a Windows NT/2000 domain controller. This greatly facilitates account management because administrators no longer need to keep the two systems synchronized, and it is possible for users whose accounts are held in a Windows domain to authenticate when accessing Samba shares.

1.6.7 Unix CIFS Extensions

The Unix CIFS extensions were developed at Hewlett-Packard and introduced in Samba 2.2.4. They allow Samba servers to support Unix filesystem attributes, such as links and permissions, when sharing files with other Unix systems. This allows Samba to be used as an alternative to network file sharing (NFS) for Unix-to-Unix file sharing. An advantage of using Samba is that it authenticates individual users, whereas NFS authenticates only clients (based on their IP addresses, which is a poor security model). This gives Samba an edge in the area of security, along with its much greater configurability. See Chapter 5 for information on how to operate Unix systems as Samba clients.

1.6.8 And More...

As usual, the code has numerous improvements that do not show up at the administrative level in an immediate or obvious way. Samba now functions better on systems that employ PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules), and there is new support for profiling. Samba's support for oplocks has been strengthened , offering better integration with NFS server- terminated leases (currently on Irix and Linux only) and in the local filesystem with SMB locks mapped to POSIX locks (which is dependent on each Unix variant's implementation of POSIX locks). And of course there have been the usual bug fixes.