File and Print Proof of Concept "Competition"

[Gary Wilson]

--- Matthew Carpenter <matt at eisgr.com> wrote:
> I was chosen as part of the Linux/Samba team and I'd
> like to make sure our POC
> solution does the technology justice.  I am a firm
> Open Source evangelist, so
> my reasons are many and varied.
> 
> The solution which seems most palatible is
> Distributed Samba, using a central
> directory for administration of authentication and
> rights.  While I would
> ordinarily choose OpenLDAP, the company has a strong
> push for AD and a large
> dependence upon eDirectory currently, so we would
> like to use one of these
> directory services for said administration.
> 

Matthew,

Samba version 3 has made great strides in this area.
Version 3 is now in its second beta, and the
developers expect it to be finalized in August.

>From the Samba team's description of version 3:

Major new features:
-------------------

1)  Active Directory support.  Samba 3.0 is now able
to  
    to join a ADS realm as a member server and
authenticate 
    users using LDAP/Kerberos.

2)  Unicode support. Samba will now negotiate UNICODE
on the wire and
    internally there is now a much better
infrastructure for multi-byte
    and UNICODE character sets.

3)  New authentication system. The internal
authentication system has
    been almost completely rewritten. Most of the
changes are internal,
    but the new auth system is also very configurable.

4)  New filename mangling system. The filename
mangling system has been
    completely rewritten. An internal database now
stores mangling maps
    persistently. This needs lots of testing.

5)  A new "net" command has been added. It is somewhat
similar to 
    the "net" command in windows. Eventually we plan
to replace 
    numerous other utilities (such as smbpasswd) with
subcommands 
    in "net".

6)  Samba now negotiates NT-style status32 codes on
the wire. This
    improves error handling a lot.

7)  Better Windows 2000/XP/2003 printing support
including publishing 
    printer attributes in active directory.

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