The Samba development team has released the first beta of Samba 4 which, after over six years of development, will introduce the first open source implementation of Microsoft's Active Directory technology.

Samba 4 provides Active Directory services, via its own LDAP and DNS implementation, that are comparable with the implementation used by Windows 2000 and later. It also includes the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) alongside the CIFS logon services from Samba 3.

The developers point out that Samba 4 beta 1 is a development version and should not be used in production environments. In particular, the switch to a new default file server is expected to introduce stability problems that the developers hope to address over the next few beta releases.

Samba 4 beta 1 can be downloaded from the project's FTP server and detailed information on the changes in this release is available on the Samba wiki. The source code for Samba is licensed under the GPLv3.

See also:

GPL policing efforts expand to include Linux and Samba, a report from The H.

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