Submitted release Samba 4.14.0 , which continued the development of the Samba 4 branch with a full implementation of a domain controller and Active Directory service, compatible with the Windows 2000 implementation and capable of serving all versions of Windows clients supported by Microsoft, including Windows 10. Samba 4 is a multifunctional server product that also provides an implementation of a file server, a print service and an identity server (winbind).
Key Changes in Samba 4.14:
- Completed a significant upgrade of the VFS layer. For historical reasons, the code with the file server implementation was tied to the processing of file paths, which was also used for the SMB2 protocol, which was translated to use descriptors. In Samba 4.14.0, the code for accessing the server’s file system has been redesigned to use file descriptors rather than file paths. For example, fstat () is used instead of stat () and SMB_VFS_FSTAT () instead of SMB_VFS_STAT ().
- Improved the reliability of publishing printers in Active Directory and enhanced information about printers passed to Active Directory. Added support for Windows printer drivers on ARM64 systems.
- Provided the ability to use Group Policy for Winbind clients. The Active Directory administrator can now define policies that change sudoers settings or add periodic cron jobs. To enable the application of group policies for a client, smb.conf provides the ‘apply group policies’ setting. The policies are applied every 90-120 minutes. In case of problems, it is possible to undo the changes with “samba-gpupdate –unapply” or reapply with “samba-gpupdate –force”. The “samba-gpupdate –rsop” command can be used to view the policies that will be applied to the system.
- Requirements for the Python language version have been increased. Samba is now required to have at least version 3.6 of Python. Build support has been dropped with older Python releases.
- The samba-tool utility implements tools for managing objects in Active Directory (users, computers, groups). To add a new object to AD, it is now allowed to use the “add” command in addition to “create”. The “rename” command is supported for renaming users, groups and contacts. To unlock users, the ‘samba-tool user unlock’ command is suggested. The ‘samba-tool user list’ and ‘samba-tool group listmembers’ commands have implemented the “–hide-expired” and “–hide-disabled” options to hide expired or disabled user accounts.
- In the CTDB component responsible for the operation of cluster configurations, politically incorrect terms have been cleaned up. Instead of master and slave when configuring NAT and LVS, it is suggested to use “leader” to refer to the main node in the group and “follower” to reach the rest of the group members. The “ctdb natgw master” command has been replaced with “ctdb natgw leader”. To indicate that a node is not a master, the “follower-only” flag is now displayed instead of “slave-only”. Removed “ctdb isnotrecmaster” command.
/Media reports.