Samba 4 is an ambitious development effort of the Samba project, 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 STATUS file, which aims to document what should and should not work.

With 3 years of development under our belt since Tridge first proposed a new Virtual File System (VFS) layer for Samba3 (a project which eventually lead to our Active Directory efforts), it was felt that we should create something we could 'show off' to our users. This is third Technology Preview (TP), aimed at allowing users, managers and developers to see how we have progressed, and to invite feedback and support.

In particular, this release has a strong focus on portability and infrastructure. The aim is to give Samba4 a solid foundation on which we can again move to create more visible features. That said, two particular technologies included in this release are the LDAP backend, and the experimental SMB2 server.

The uncompressed tarball and patch files have been signed with Andrew Bartlett's key (ID 157BC95E). The source code can be downloaded now. See the release notes for more information.