Samba 4

Speaking of Sama, Technical Preview 5 (TP5) for Samba 4 came out last month. And what’s so great about Samba 4? It’s a little thing called Active Directory. Until now, using Samba as a PDC only gave you NT4 functionality, but with Samba 4 comes promises of full AD integration. It will include it’s own LDAP server and it’s own Kerberos implementation.

I’ve been watching this project for some time. Working for an NPO (Non-Profit Organization) we don’t have much of an IT budget, so when it came time to buy a server, I put all the money I had into hardware, and had to use free software. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying free = bad. On the contrary, I frequently use OSS(Open Source Software). I have an OpenBSD router and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server running certain custom Apps and I wouldn’t run them on anything else. I use VMWare on Ubuntu and I wouldn’t dream of running it on Windows. But when it comes to a domain controller, Samba has been a bit lacking. I hate to admit it, but Microsoft did a good job on Active Directory, and I’ve begrudged the fact that I can’t use it for some time.

But that’s all changing soon. According to the “WHATSNEW” doc in TP5, an alpha version of Samba 4 should be released in the next few months! Then comes BETA, and then eventually a stable release of Samba 4 with full AD support. I can’t wait. Until then, I’ll get everything I can out of Samba with OpenLDAP, but that day is coming!