Samba 3.4.3 is released. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS.

Samba 4, currently the alpha development of Active Directory for Linux and Unix, has been in parallel development with Samba 3. Allison says "The ultimate goal for Samba 4 will be to merge with the Samba 3 file server code, something that is called "Frankie" internally, after Frankenstein, the merging of the body parts...

For years, if you wanted an inexpensive, but Windows-compatible file and print server, you turned to Samba running on Linux. Now, with the first alpha release of Samba 4, this open-source project is moving closer to becoming a complete Windows 2003/Longhorn replacement.

"The Samba team will soon get the fruits of the EU antitrust suit against Microsoft. Samba is software which allows an operating system to communicate with Microsoft Windows shared folders and printers over a network. The network protocols Microsoft uses are secret and had to be determined by Samba programmers by listening on the wire to see what Microsoft’s proprietary software would do given a particular input. Microsoft had to be forced to produce the documentation for various network protocols they use..."

The intent of this article is to show you how to configure your Linux machine and Samba server to participate in a Windows 2003 Active Directory domain as a Member Server using Kerberos authentication. This involves using the security = ADS security mode in Samba.

To easily share your files to linux and windows clients, samba is still the preferred choice. In this guide I will show how to setup a samba server on centos 5 machine, that can be accessed only by certain people protected by password.

Every few months the Samba developers have started releasing a status and direction report called "The Samba Team Blog".

The development team behind open source file and print server Samba have released versions 3.0.37, 3.2.15, 3.3.8 and 3.4.2. They fix three vulnerabilities which attackers could exploit to access data or disable the server. In addition to the new versions, source code patches are also available.

A complicated third-party arrangement means that the open-source Samba project will be able to make use of proprietary documents describing Microsoft file-sharing software.

Samba, governed by the General Public License (GPL), lets Unix or Linux servers behave like Windows machines used to share files over a network and control networked printers. But the effort has been difficult: Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to share the details of the protocols; patent infringement concerns also have appeared more than once.