Samba 4 is the ambitious next version of the Samba suite that is being developed in parallel to the stable 3.0 series. The main emphasis in this branch is support for the Active Directory logon protocols used by Windows 2000 and above.

Samba 4 is currently not yet in a state where it is usable in production environments. Note the WARNINGS below, and the STATUS file, which aims to document what should and should not work.

Samba4 alpha4 follows on from our second alpha release (made in December), the first alpha release (made in September), and the Technology Preview series we have offered for some time now.

The uncompressed tarball and patch files have been signed using Andrew Bartlett's GnuPG key (ID 28B436BB). The source code can be downloaded now. See the release notes in the source for more information.