Samba is a a free software licensed under the GNU General Public License which is used to enable interaction between Microsoft Windows and other systems (like Unix, Linux etc.) Samba offers security, stability and file services for all linux and windows clients such as DOS, Windows, OS/2. Samba is a very popular tool for performing file transfers. This multiplatform tool is written in C , C++ , Python and its name Samba comes from SMB (Server Message Block).
Short History
Samba Unix was initially released in December 1991 and January 1992 by Andrew Tridgell, a PhD student at the Australian National University at that time. Samba did not have a proper name, and Tridgell just called it “a Unix file server for Dos Pathworks”.
With a focus on interoperability with Microsoft’s LAN Manager, Tridgell released “netbios for unix”, nbserver, version 1.5 in December 1993. This release was the first to include client-software as well as a server. Also, at this time GPL2 was chosen as license.
Midway through the 1.5-series, the name was changed to smbserver. However, Tridgell got a trademark notice from the company “Syntax”, who sold a product named TotalNet Advanced Server and owned the trademark for “SMBserver”. The name “Samba” was derived by running the Unix command grep through the system dictionary looking for words that contained the letters S, M, and B, in that order (i.e. grep -i ‘^s.*m.*b’ /usr/share/dict/words).” (Reference: wikipedia)
Samba 4.0.10
The stable release is 4.0.10 which has been released two days ago, on 8th October 2013. This release includes many fixes to major bugs and many others.
What are some of the major bugs fixed? Samba 4.0.10 includes fixes to the following major bugs:
– The problem of CPU hogging NetBIOS samba process that consumes 100% CPU
– The problem of stale shared entries that are left behind after smbd crashes
– The failure of POSIX ACL mapping, when setting DENY ACE’s from Windows
Samba 4.0.10 comes with a new parameter called “acl allow execute always”. This parameter helps to ease upgrades from Samba 3.6 and older.
Other fixes:
– Fix for the build error in scavenger.c Fix for making Samba work on site with Read Only Domain Controller.
– Fix for masks that are incorrectly applied to UNIX extension permission changes.
– Fix for “invalid conversion error” messages for valid utf8 file-names.
– Fix for errors while building Samba 4.0.x on AIX with IBM XL C/C++
