Download Samba 4.4.0

Version 4.4 of Samba has been released. This program runs on Unix, BSD and Linux servers, and is an open source implementation of the smb/cifsnetwork protocol. Since version 3, Samba can offer file and print services to Windows clients and is able to act as a domain controller. Extensive documentation, including practical how-tos for a slightly older version, can be found at this page are being found. With this release, support for version 3 of Samba has officially ended. The most important changes in version 4.4 are listed below for you.

Asynchronous flush requests
Flush requests from SMB2/3 clients are handled asynchronously and do not block the processing of other requests. Note that ‘strict sync’ has to be set to ‘yes’ for Samba to honor flush requests from SMB clients.

s3: smbd
Remove ‘–with-aio-support’ configure option. We no longer would ever prefer POSIX-RT aio, use pthread_aio instead.

samba tool sites
The ‘samba-tool sites’ subcommand can now be run against another server by specifying an LDB URL using the ‘-H’ option and not against the local database only (which is still the default when no URL is given).

samba-tool domain demote
Add ‘–remove-other-dead-server’ option to ‘samba-tool domain demote’ subcommand. The new version of this tool now can remove another DC that is itself offline. The ‘–remove-other-dead-server’ removes as many references to the DC as possible.

samba tool drs clone-dc database
Replicate an initial clone of domain, but do not join it. This is developed for debugging purposes, but not for setting up another DC.

pdbedit
Add ‘–set-nt-hash’ option to pdbedit to update user password from nt-hash hexstring. ‘pdbedit -vw’ shows also password hashes.

smbstatus
‘smbstatus’ was enhanced to show the state of signing and encryption for sessions and shares.

smbget
The -u and -p options for user and password were replaced by the -U option that accepts username[%password] as in many other tools of the Samba suite. Similary, smbgetrc files do not accept username and password options any more, only a single “user” option which also accepts user%password combinations. The -P option was removed.

s4-rpc_server
Add a GnuTLS based backup key implementation.

ntlm_auth
Using the ‘–offline-logon’ enables ntlm_auth to use cached passwords when the DC is offline.
Allow ‘–password’ force a local password check for ntlm-server-1 mode.

vfs_offline
A new VFS module called vfs_offline has been added to mark all files in the share as offline. It can be useful for shares mounted on top of a remote file system (either through a samba VFS module or via FUSE).

KCC
The Samba KCC has been improved, but is still disabled by default.

DNS
There were several improvements concerning the Samba DNS server.

Active Directory
There were some improvements in the Active Directory area.

WINS nsswitch module
The WINS nsswitch module has been rewritten to address memory issues and to simplify the code. The module now uses libwbclient to do WINS queries. This means that winbind needs to be running in order to resolve WINS names using the nss_wins module. This does not affect smbd.

CTDB changes

• CTDB now uses a newly implemented parallel database recovery scheme that avoids deadlocks with smbd.
  In certain circumstances CTDB and smbd could deadlock. The new recovery implementation avoid this. It also provides improved recovery performance.
• All files are now installed into and referred to by the paths configured at build time. Therefore, CTDB will now work properly when installed into the default location at /usr/local.
• Public CTDB header files are no longer installed, since Samba and CTDB are built from within the same source tree.
• CTDB_DBDIR can now be set to tmpfs[:]
  This will cause volatile TDBs to be located in a tmpfs. This can help to avoid performance problems associated with contention on the disk where volatile TDBs are usually stored. See ctdbd.conf(5) for more details.
• Configuration variable CTDB_NATGW_SLAVE_ONLY is no longer used. Instead, nodes should be annotated with the “slave-only” option in the CTDB NAT gateway nodes file. This file must be consistent across nodes in a NAT gateway group. See ctdbd.conf(5) for more details.
• New event script 05.system allows various system resources to be monitored
  This can be helpful for explaining poor performance or unexpected behaviour. New configuration variables are CTDB_MONITOR_FILESYSTEM_USAGE, CTDB_MONITOR_MEMORY_USAGE and CTDB_MONITOR_SWAP_USAGE. Default values ​​cause warnings to be logged. See the SYSTEM RESOURCE MONITORING CONFIGURATION in ctdbd.conf(5) for more information.
  The memory, swap and filesystem usage monitoring previously found in 00.ctdb and 40.fs_use is no longer available. Therefore, configuration variables CTDB_CHECK_FS_USE, CTDB_MONITOR_FREE_MEMORY, CTDB_MONITOR_FREE_MEMORY_WARN and CTDB_CHECK_SWAP_IS_NOT_USED are now ignored.
• The 62.cnfs event script has been removed. To get a similar effect just do something like this:
  • mmaddcallback ctdb-disable-on-quorumLoss \ –command /usr/bin/ctdb \ –event quorumLoss –parms “disable”
  • mmaddcallback ctdb-enable-on-quorumReached \ –command /usr/bin/ctdb \ –event quorumReached –parms “enable”
• The CTDB tunable parameter EventScriptTimeoutCount has been renamed to MonitorTimeoutCount
  It has only ever been used to limit timed-out monitor events.
  Configurations containing CTDB_SET_EventScriptTimeoutCount= will cause CTDB to fail at startup. Useful messages will be logged.
• The commandline option “-n all” to CTDB tool has been removed.
  The option was not uniformly implemented for all the commands. Instead of command “ctdb ip -n all”, use “ctdb ip all”.
• All CTDB current manual pages are now correctly installed