Samba 4.4 Has Released

[mlnews]

The Samba project has announced the release of Samba 4.4.

Asynchronous flush requests

Flush requests from SMB2/3 clients are handled asynchronously and do
not block the processing of other requests. Note that 'strict sync'
has to be set to 'yes' for Samba to honor flush requests from SMB
clients.

s3: smbd

Remove '--with-aio-support' configure option. We no longer would ever prefer
POSIX-RT aio, use pthread_aio instead.

samba-tool sites

The 'samba-tool sites' subcommand can now be run against another server by
specifying an LDB URL using the '-H' option and not against the local database
only (which is still the default when no URL is given).

samba-tool domain demote

Add '--remove-other-dead-server' option to 'samba-tool domain demote'
subcommand. The new version of this tool now can remove another DC that is
itself offline. The '--remove-other-dead-server' removes as many references
to the DC as possible.

samba-tool drs clone-dc-database

Replicate an initial clone of domain, but do not join it.
This is developed for debugging purposes, but not for setting up another DC.

pdbedit

Add '--set-nt-hash' option to pdbedit to update user password from nt-hash
hexstring. 'pdbedit -vw' shows also password hashes.

smbstatus

'smbstatus' was enhanced to show the state of signing and encryption for
sessions and shares.

smbget

The -u and -p options for user and password were replaced by the -U option that
accepts username[%password] as in many other tools of the Samba suite.
Similary, smbgetrc files do not accept username and password options any more,
only a single "user" option which also accepts user%password combinations.
The -P option was removed.

s4-rpc_server

Add a GnuTLS based backupkey implementation.

ntlm_auth

Using the '--offline-logon' enables ntlm_auth to use cached passwords when the
DC is offline.

Allow '--password' force a local password check for ntlm-server-1 mode.

vfs_offline

A new VFS module called vfs_offline has been added to mark all files in the
share as offline. It can be useful for shares mounted on top of a remote file
system (either through a samba VFS module or via FUSE).

KCC

The Samba KCC has been improved, but is still disabled by default.

DNS

There were several improvements concerning the Samba DNS server.

Active Directory

There were some improvements in the Active Directory area.

WINS nsswitch module

The WINS nsswitch module has been rewritten to address memory issues and to
simplify the code. The module now uses libwbclient to do WINS queries. This
means that winbind needs to be running in order to resolve WINS names using
the nss_wins module. This does not affect smbd.

CTDB changes

• CTDB now uses a newly implemented parallel database recovery scheme
  that avoids deadlocks with smbd.

  In certain circumstances CTDB and smbd could deadlock. The new
  recovery implementation avoid this. It also provides improved
  recovery performance.

• All files are now installed into and referred to by the paths
  configured at build time. Therefore, CTDB will now work properly
  when installed into the default location at /usr/local.

• Public CTDB header files are no longer installed, since Samba and
  CTDB are built from within the same source tree.

• CTDB_DBDIR can now be set to tmpfs[:<tmpfs-options>]

  This will cause volatile TDBs to be located in a tmpfs. This can
  help to avoid performance problems associated with contention on the
  disk where volatile TDBs are usually stored. See ctdbd.conf(5) for
  more details.

• Configuration variable CTDB_NATGW_SLAVE_ONLY is no longer used.
  Instead, nodes should be annotated with the "slave-only" option in
  the CTDB NAT gateway nodes file. This file must be consistent
  across nodes in a NAT gateway group. See ctdbd.conf(5) for more
  details.

• New event script 05.system allows various system resources to be
  monitored

  This can be helpful for explaining poor performance or unexpected
  behaviour. New configuration variables are
  CTDB_MONITOR_FILESYSTEM_USAGE, CTDB_MONITOR_MEMORY_USAGE and
  CTDB_MONITOR_SWAP_USAGE. Default values cause warnings to be
  logged. See the SYSTEM RESOURCE MONITORING CONFIGURATION in
  ctdbd.conf(5) for more information.

  The memory, swap and filesystem usage monitoring previously found in
  00.ctdb and 40.fs_use is no longer available. Therefore,
  configuration variables CTDB_CHECK_FS_USE, CTDB_MONITOR_FREE_MEMORY,
  CTDB_MONITOR_FREE_MEMORY_WARN and CTDB_CHECK_SWAP_IS_NOT_USED are
  now ignored.

• The 62.cnfs eventscript has been removed. To get a similar effect
  just do something like this:

  mmaddcallback ctdb-disable-on-quorumLoss \
    --command /usr/bin/ctdb \
    --event quorumLoss --parms "disable"
  
  mmaddcallback ctdb-enable-on-quorumReached \
    --command /usr/bin/ctdb \
    --event quorumReached --parms "enable"
  

• The CTDB tunable parameter EventScriptTimeoutCount has been renamed
  to MonitorTimeoutCount

  It has only ever been used to limit timed-out monitor events.

  Configurations containing CTDB_SET_EventScriptTimeoutCount=<n> will
  cause CTDB to fail at startup. Useful messages will be logged.

• The commandline option "-n all" to CTDB tool has been removed.

  The option was not uniformly implemented for all the commands.
  Instead of command "ctdb ip -n all", use "ctdb ip all".

• All CTDB current manual pages are now correctly installed

[scottalanmiller]

That is a lot of updates!