Development

devel.samba.org contains information about the the current state of samba development. It should be interesting for those developing samba and those following samba development.

Very often the question arises as to what the future plans for Samba are. Fox example, "What functionality will be included in the next stable release?", "What is the differences between the various CVS code branches?", and "How can I get help?". The information on this page should help to clear up some of these questions.

General Road map

Currently the plans for releases are as follows. Note that because Samba development is driven by volunteers and demand, the best way to help us stabilize the nest release and/or feature is help out.

2.0.x: (CVS tag SAMBA_2_0)

2.2.x: (CVS tag SAMBA_2_2)

Samba 2.2 includes the following new features:

• Domain logon support for Windows NT 4.0 SP3+ and Windows 2000 clients
• Support for native Windows NT4/2000/XP printing RPCs. This includes support for automatic printer driver download.
• Support for server supported Access Control Lists (ACLs).
• Rewritten internal locking semantics for more robustness
• Conversion of various internal flat data structures to use database records for increased performance and flexibility.
• Support for acting as a MS-DFS server
• Support for Windows 2000 Client Side Caching
• Rewritten VFS layer
• Improved PAM support for account and session management
• Rewritten password and group backend API
• Support for storing user accounts in an LDAP directory
• The Winbind PAM and NSS modules for authenticating PAM aware UNIX services against an Windows NT 4.0 domain
• New internal messaging system between Samba server processes

3.0: (CVS tag SAMBA_3_0)

Please see the Samba 3.0 Roadmap for details on the upcoming Samba 3.0 Release.

CVS access

TODO list for volunteers

If you are interested in volunteering to help Samba development, here is a list of projects to begin with. Please coordinate all development efforts on the samba-technical mailing list.

Click here to view the list of projects

In order to avoid any potential licensing issues we also ask that any who have signed the Microsoft CIFS Royalty Free Agreement not submit patches to Samba, nor base patches on the referenced specification. Finally, as with all GPL work, the submitter should ensure that any patches that you submit do not conflict with any 3rd party copyright.

How can I learn more about CIFS, MS-RPC, Samba internals, etc...

For anyone interested in getting up to speed with SMB/CIFS, NetBIOS, MS-RPC, etc... Here are some links to help out. Please let me know if you have other links, specifications, documentation, tools, etc... that you think will be helpful.

• Get a copy of Ethereal or possible Microsoft's Network Monitor shipped with Windows NT/2k server.
   
• See the docs at
  • The Samba Developer's Guide available in PDF or HTML format
  • SNIA CIFS Technical Reference
  • http://www.cb1.com/~lkcl/ntdom/
  • Chris Hertels' "Understanding the Network Neighborhood"
  • Microsoft's FTP Site/
  • Luke Leighton's book with New Riders Publishing DCE/RPC over SMB: Samba and Windows NT Domain Internals, ISBN 1-57870-150-3.
     
• get a symbolic debugger (gdb, ddd, ups, etc...) and step through the smbd source code as it is running in response to a SMB call (or RPC) that you are interested in.
   
• The MSDN site (msdn.microsoft.com) is pretty good as well if you know what you are looking for.
   

My personal preference is for a debugger alongside the protocol specs and a netmon session. :-)

Coding tools

As far as what editor to use, it is your preference. Obviously is needs to be one that doesn't munge formatting (just to help you out). :-)

I use RedHat's Source Navigator which does generate **huge** cross reference databases but let's you get around in the code fairly well. Did I mention you need to run X to use this? See http://sourcenav.sourceforge.net/ for a download link. One could also use 'ctags' to navigate thru the source code.

Of course, vi and grep will get you there too. :-)

Hyperlinked cross reference of Samba source

Development Coordination

The main samba development channel on IRC is #samba-technical, server irc.freenode.net. Please don't ask user questions in this channel, but in #samba. Channel logs are available as well.

The development of samba is discussed via email on the samba technical mailing list.

Samba TNG

Please be aware that development in the SAMBA_TNG code branch has forked from the mainline Samba code. We wish the new SAMBA_TNG developers the best of success. Both groups have committed to continue to share ideas and discoveries regarding NetBIOS, SMB, and MS-RPC mechanisms with each other. For more information regarding the Samba TNG project, please visit http://www.samba-tng.org.

What does the Samba Team plan to do to integrate Samba servers into native Windows 2000 domains?

The Samba Team hope to gain more volunteers to help with this effort. There are basically three areas of functionality in regards to this. The ball has already started rolling with some research done by IBM's Linux Technology Center.

• A Kerberos 5 client implementation in Samba that understands the proprietary MS PAC
• A UNIX based Kerberos 5 KDC that can issue Windows 2000 PACs
• The ability to read data from an Active (i.e. LDAP) Directory Server via the authorization credentials (TGT) received from the Windows 2000 Domain KDC

Of course, Samba is currently able to continue to operate in a Windows 2000 domain assuming that the domain supports Windows NT 4.0 File and Print servers. The new ADS (Active Directory) work has gained us much in the ability to act as a server in an ADS domain, but nothing in becoming a PDC.