Samba Team Announces Samba 1.9.17

Greater speed and scalability for corporate networks with
Windows-compatible clients


Canberra, Australia, August 26 1997 - The Samba Team is pleased to
announce version 1.9.17 of Samba, the leading suite of corporate network
integration tools. Designed to service any Server Message Block (SMB)
client, Samba is compatible with all Microsoft (tm) Networking clients
including Windows 95 (tm), Windows NT (tm) Workstation and Server,
Windows for Workgroups (tm), IBM OS/2 (tm), smbfs for Linux and
Thursby Software Systems DAVE (tm) Macintosh SMB client.

Samba is distinguished by its scalability, speed and flexibility. It is
freely distributed with source code, and has high-quality support.
Over ninety specialist support companies worldwide offer commercial
support for Samba, which is also supported by copious Internet
resources and a mailing list with ten thousand subscribers.

Sites with Microsoft Windows NT or Windows 95 clients benefit
particularly from this new release. Samba now functions as a logon
server for Windows 95 and supports roving profiles. Already a favorite
with administrators because of its flexible and dynamic configuration
options, version 1.9.17 of Samba has even more reasons for being used
to serve files and printers to Microsoft clients.

Samba has an assured future. With many hundreds of thousands of
installed systems around the world, Samba is making it possible for many
kinds of systems to share files that have been incompatible until now.
The Samba Team has been consulting widely with large (and small) users
of the product about future directions for Samba  and will be
publishing a road-map with the next major release. Anyone wishing to
provide input should send a message to the mailing list
samba-plans@samba.org

Besides this, the next release will focus on better integration of
non-UNIX ports, further performance improvements and scalability to
hundreds of thousands of machines in an SMB network.


Also in release 1.9.17 of Samba:

CIFS Support

Samba implements the Common Internet Filesystem protocol, the Internet
Engineering Task Force draft protocol for extending SMB to the Internet.
Samba keeps pace with CIFS developments. See
http://anu.samba.org/cifs/.

More speed

Samba now passes the most rigorous Ziff-Davis NetBench test suite with
flying colors. Performance is not lost when more users are added, up to
the limits of the host operating system. When used with technologies
such 64-bit operating systems (such as some versions of UNIX, MVS or
VMS), many CPUs and Gibabit ethernet, pre-release versions of Samba
1.9.17 have been running for some months at several large sites
supporting tens of thousands of users.

More servers

Samba runs on UNIX (tm) and near clones from over 30 vendors, besides
IBM MVS (tm), Digital Equipment VMS (tm), Stratos VOS (tm), all versions of
IBM OS/2 Warp (tm), Novell Netware (tm), Amiga OS (tm) and others.
Most corporate data servers are supported, besides countless small
networks running less powerful operating systems.

More clients

Windows NT, Windows 95, Linux, OS/2 Warp, Windows for Workgroups come
with SMB network file systems by default. Windows 3.1, DOS, AIX and others
have equivalent add-ons. Different SMB clients have different extensions and
different bugs. Samba goes to great lengths to accommodate clients that
are in use, and is now more compatible with more types of clients than
any other SMB server.

Larger networks

Release 1.9.17 provides support for over 2,000 clients simultaneously
per samba server. Many Samba servers of this scale can work together.
Some sites have shown that a user database of 100 000 users shared
between 20 servers works. We do not know what the upper limit is,
although we plan to find out. The Samba Team has been focusing on
providing reliable wide-area operation, and acknowledges the support of
major UNIX system vendors who have helped in testing on large WANs.

Better Browsing

This release improves Samba maintenance of browse lists (the Network
Neighborhood), especially across large multi-segmented networks. Samba
can provide a picture of what machines are available on even very large
networks, beyond the scope of any other SMB product.


More Information and Downloading

For more information on Samba see

        http://samba.canberra.edu.au/pub/samba/

Demand for Samba is very high. For a faster download and to minimize
Internet traffic over the period following this release, please use a
Samba mirror site. The list of mirror sites is contained in

        ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/MIRRORS.txt

The official master ftp location is

        ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/samba-latest.tar.gz

Some of the products mentioned in this document are registered
trademarks of other companies. The samba-bugs@samba.org address
referred to in this release is *not* to be used for general enquiries or
support requests. See the web pages for information about the general
Samba mailing list and a listing of commercial support providers.

Thanks

This release of Samba was made possible with the generous help of the
following companies (in alphabetical order):

Aquasoft Pty Ltd.       : http://www.aquasoft.com.au
Red Hat Software.       : http://www.redhat.com
Silicon Graphics, Inc.  : http://www.sgi.com.
Whistle Communications  : http://www.whistle.com

Please note that this does not imply endorsement of Samba by the above
named companies.


Samba Team members

The Samba Team are (in alphabetical order) :

Jeremy Allison  - Whistle Communications
Paul Blackman   - University of Canberra
Dave Fenwick    - Asset Software
Chris Hertel    - University of Minnesota
Peter Kelly     - ETS
Luke Leighton   - Pires
Richard Sharpe  - NS Computer Software
Dan Shearer     - University of South Australia
John Terpstra   - Aquasoft Pty Ltd.
Andrew Tridgell - Australian National University
Volker Lendeke  - Service Network, GmbH.

Copying

Unrestricted reproduction rights of this press release are granted, so
long as it remains clear that:

         i) Samba is copyright by Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team, 1992-1997
        ii) Samba is made available freely under the widely-used
            GNU public license. A copy of this is at

                ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/COPYING

            This license encourages commercial use and modification. The
            only restriction is that all source code incorporating Samba
            must always be freely available
       iii) The contact for all issues related to intellectual
            property rights for Samba is samba-bugs@samba.org


Regards,
	The Samba Team.