Samba is the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix.
Samba is Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License, the Samba project is a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Since 1992, Samba has provided secure, stable and fast file and print services for all clients using the SMB/CIFS protocol, such as all versions of DOS and Windows, OS/2, Linux and many others.
Samba is an important component to seamlessly integrate Linux/Unix Servers and Desktops into Active Directory environments using the winbind daemon.
Latest News
- 22 December 2017 Samba 4.7.4 Available for Download
- 20 December 2017 Samba 4.6.12 Available for Download
- 08 December 2017 Software Freedom Conservancy 2017 Fundraising Campaign
- 21 November 2017 Samba 4.7.3, 4.6.11 and 4.5.15 Security Releases Available for Download
- 15 November 2017 Samba 4.6.10 Available for Download
- 15 November 2017 Samba 4.7.2 Available for Download
- 02 November 2017 Samba 4.7.1 Available for Download
- 25 October 2017 Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit
- 25 October 2017 Samba 4.6.9 Available for Download
- 17 October 2017 2017 SNIA Conference and Microsoft Trip Report
22 December 2017
Samba 4.7.4 Available for Download
This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.7 release series.
The uncompressed tarball has been signed using GnuPG (ID 6F33915B6568B7EA). The source code can be downloaded now. A patch against Samba 4.7.3 is also available. See the release notes for more info.
20 December 2017
Samba 4.6.12 Available for Download
This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.6 release series.
The uncompressed tarball has been signed using GnuPG (ID 6F33915B6568B7EA). The source code can be downloaded now. A patch against Samba 4.6.11 is also available. See the release notes for more info.
08 December 2017
Software Freedom Conservancy 2017 Fundraising Campaign
Software Freedom Conservancy, the non-profit umbrella organization behind Samba, recently announced a fundraising campaign.
Thanks to Private Internet Access and an anonymous donor, all donations up to $75,000 will be matched dollar for dollar until January 15.
"Software Freedom Conservancy is not only the home of the Samba project, it's a staunch defender of Software Freedom in the Computer industry. Now more than ever we need Free Software in our devices and on the Internet. I'm a Software Freedom Conservancy Board Member and I also donate to the organization. I hope you will too !" :- Jeremy Allison, Samba Team.
21 November 2017
Samba 4.7.3, 4.6.11 and 4.5.15 Security Releases Available for Download
These are security releases in order to address CVE-2017-14746 (Use-after-free vulnerability) and CVE-2017-15275 (Server heap memory information leak).
The uncompressed tarballs have been signed using GnuPG (ID 6F33915B6568B7EA).
The 4.7.3 source code can be downloaded now.
A patch against Samba 4.7.2 is also available.
See the release notes for more info.
The 4.6.11 source code can be downloaded now.
A patch against Samba 4.6.10 is also available.
See the release notes for more info.
The 4.5.15 source code can be downloaded now.
A patch against Samba 4.5.14 is also available.
See the release notes for more info.
15 November 2017
Samba 4.6.10 Available for Download
This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.6 release series.
The uncompressed tarball has been signed using GnuPG (ID 6F33915B6568B7EA). The source code can be downloaded now. A patch against Samba 4.6.9 is also available. See the release notes for more info.
15 November 2017
Samba 4.7.2 Available for Download
This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.7 release series.
The uncompressed tarball has been signed using GnuPG (ID 6F33915B6568B7EA). The source code can be downloaded now. A patch against Samba 4.7.1 is also available. See the release notes for more info.
02 November 2017
Samba 4.7.1 Available for Download
This is the first stable release of the Samba 4.7 release series.
The uncompressed tarball has been signed using GnuPG (ID 6F33915B6568B7EA). The source code can be downloaded now. A patch against Samba 4.7.0 is also available. See the release notes for more info.
25 October 2017
Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit
I attended the GSoC 2017 Mentor Summit - Photo! It was an enjoyable event, and a good learning experience.
The Google Summer of Code 2017 Mentor Summit ran from Oct 13th to the 15th, at Google’s Sunnyvale campus. It was held as an "Unconference", so most of the sessions were pretty ad-hoc.
On Saturday morning I ran into a couple of ex-colleagues, attending the summit on behalf of the Performance Co-Pilot project. We took the opportunity to start the conference with a monitoring BoF, which focussed on some of the current upstream PCP challenges, such as bulk archive analysis and caching (with Redis). We had a quick look at the PCP cifs.ko monitoring agent, where I raised concerns about it only supporting the SMB1 /proc/fs/cifs/Stats format. My preference would be to in future move the cifs.ko stats into per-metric files nested under per-mount/session sysfs directories, to make the stats easier to parse programatically.
I attended quite a few other interesting talks, covering Computer Vision/AI, Linux/ChromeOS (Grant Grundler), Crypto Currencies, and fuzzing. The libfuzzy talk, held by Kostya Serebryany, was probably the most relevant to Samba. Kostya walked through the list of FOSS projects which are automatically tested as part of Google’s oss-fuzz program, and described the breakdown of bugs discovered (hundreds of potential security vulnerabilities). Most of the material can be found at https://testing.googleblog.com/2017/05/oss-fuzz-five-months-later-and.html . As a GSoC participant, Samba is in a position to receive GCE backed automated fuzz testing. It should just be a matter of ensuring that Samba can be built with LLVM/Clang, identifying target APIs, and submitting a request via https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz#accepting-new-projects .
I gave a quick presentation on rapid testing of cifs.ko against Samba from source (similar to https://youtu.be/XTEGe0lG3yc). Not many attendees, but still got some good questions at the end.
In the hallway track, I spoke with Ton Roosendaal about a few issues that he’d been seeing regarding macOS SMB clients against Samba. A few questions came in about cross-share server-side copy, which I was gladly able to answer. On Sunday, we had a get together for Software Freedom Conservency member projects. After introductions, we discussed upcoming events, and fund raising challenges; the SFC are ramping up for an end of year fund raising drive.
[I would like to thank Google for paying for my travel to the event.]
Cheers, David Disseldorp
25 October 2017
Samba 4.6.9 Available for Download
This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.6 release series.
The uncompressed tarball has been signed using GnuPG (ID 6F33915B6568B7EA). The source code can be downloaded now. A patch against Samba 4.6.8 is also available. See the release notes for more info.
17 October 2017
2017 SNIA Conference and Microsoft Trip Report
Last month was a very productive one for the Samba project. The yearly Storage Networking Industry Association Storage Developers Conference (SNIA-SDC) was held in Santa Clara, California. As usual it was an excuse for as many Team members as possible to get together and hack on interoperability between Samba and other vendor SMB1/2/3 and Active Directory software, as well as go out for spectacularly bad Mexican food and drink margaritas.
After the conference many Team members went up to Redmond, Washington - Microsoft HQ, to an event generously hosted by Microsoft to improve Samba / Windows interoperability. Thanks a LOT to Microsoft for hosting us and putting up with our strange requirements (No blue M&M's, Metze, really ?).
Samba related videos from SNIA-SDC
SDC 2017 - SMB3 and Beyond for Linux: State of Unix Extensions, as We Drive Toward Optimal POSIX Compatibility and Performance - Steven French
SDC 2017 - Windows Authentication With Multiple Domains and Forests - Stefan Metzmacher
SDC 2017 - Understanding and Improving Samba Fileserver Performance - Ralph Böhme
SDC 2017-SMB3 POSIX Extensions: Client Perspective and Server Perspective - Steve French and Jeremy Allison
Some of the exciting things that we worked on were:
SMB3 in the cloud !
At SNIA-SDC we did a demonstration in conjunction with Visuality Systems, Apple, and Microsoft, of six different SMB client implementations accessing the same data simultaneously in Microsoft's Azure Cloud file store over encrypted SMB3. Amazingly, everything worked as planned.
Persistent handles and leases, how DO they work ?
Ralph Böhme of SerNet did lots of research on how persistent handles interact with leases and Günther Deschner of Red Hat worked on adding lease break retransmission tests. This work goes a long way towards creating the kind of tests we need to ensure our implementation will be completely compatible with Windows clients.
SMB and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) in the Linux kernel.
Stefan Metzmacher of SerNet prototyped an smbdirect.ko module for the Linux kernel, which will make SMB-Direct with RDMA reads and writes available for user space applications like Samba's 'smbd' and 'smbclient' as well as in kernel uses. The Linux kernel cifs.ko client might also use it in future. It makes use of native socket system calls, and simulates the traffic of SMB over TCP/NBT with the 4 byte length header. This makes it transparent to the application except for the special RDMA read/write fast path operations.
Aurélien Aptel of SUSE worked on updating the cifs.ko kernel documentation which is really old. The most interesting change is in the TODO file which serves as a roadmap of where cifs.ko is going. Aurélien, who also collaborated with Pavel Shilovsky of Microsoft on adding compound requests for SMB2+ to the Linux kernel client.
SMB3 UNIX Extensions
Jeremy Allison of Google and Steve French of Primary Data worked on design and prototyping of the UNIX extensions for SMB3, in collaboration with Tom Talpy, David Goebel and Mathew George of Microsoft. Watch this space for more details soon.
Samba on Windows !
But the prize for hack-of-the year goes to James Cain of Snell Advanced Media and Volker Lendecke of Sernet. James told Volker how to disable the built-in SMB server on Windows, allowing Volker (with some small changes) to get the Samba smbd SMB1/2/3 server running natively on Windows under the Microsoft Linux subsystem ! Samba RULES !!!
The changes needed lead to some feedback to the Microsoft Linux subsystem Team, who are planning to make some changes that will remove the need for Samba code changes in the future, thus allowing Samba-FUSE(file systems in userspace)-like innovation via the Samba VFS (Virtual File System) interface that's built into smbd.
We do indeed live in interesting times !