Samba4 reached an important milestone tonight, as I installed it for my wife to use as her file server for all of her important documents, email, the book she is working on etc.
Those of you who have been around Samba development for a while will know that my wife tends to be the first test user of major new versions of Samba, and she volunteered again this time. Susan played a large part in the original motivation to develop Samba more than 12 years ago, so she knows how useful it is to have a local test user. Reaching this stage does not mean that you should now go and install Samba4 on your production servers. Only a very keen (foolish?) person would do that. The code is quite incomplete, and is missing major features such as no netbios name server, no winbind, no admin tools, and very little documentation. So unless you are a keen C programmer then stay well clear for the moment. What this milestone means is that the code is now fairly robust, and that major applications (Eudora, OpenOffics.org, MS Word, Firefox etc) all work well and that I am quite confident of not losing data. Of course, I also have a very strict automated backup regime setup for my wife, so if I'm wrong about the robustness we can recover without me having to cook dinner for a week as penance. The code isn't available as a "alpha" quality release yet, as there are just too many missing features, although I do plan on doing a "snapshot" release shortly (maybe within a week?). So far the only problem on my wifes machine is that Eudora startup is a bit slow. That is caused by Norton Anti-Virus on her WinXP box scanning all the dlls and the exe, along with the fact that Samba4 does not yet have oplocks, so the client cannot cache the files for fast re-scanning. With norton disabled startup is fast. If you want to get involved in Samba4 development then see http://devel.samba.org/, checkout the code, and start reading. Having at look at the (incomplete) prog_guide.txt is a good idea. If you just want to see some slides on the design of Samba4, then there are some links to various talks I've given on my homepage at http://samba.org/~tridge/ I'd like to thank everyone who has worked so hard over the last couple of years to get us this far. It's been a long haul, but the results are well worth it. Samba4 is a great basis for future Samba development. In particular I'd like to thank the members of the Samba Team who have put so much into the development of Samba4. It's been a great team effort, and a lot of fun. Now back to more coding .... Cheers, Tridge -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba