Five years after Samba 2.0 – with 31 dot releases intervening – the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients.

Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to the SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison.

Given the recent release, one Samba 3.2 innovation that Microsoft might adopt, Allison said, is its extension of the CIFS/SMB protocol to allow transport encryption. File system shares can now be marked as “encrypted” and all access to these shares is now encrypted over the network. Standard GSSAPI encryption techniques are used to safeguard the data.

Having spent the last year trying to get Samba 3.0 out and having been told by OEMs that Samna needs a more dependable release schedule, Samba is now going over to a Canonical-style update schedule of every six months. The next release is due in December, Allison said.

The 3.3 update will get out because Samba has recruited a woman product manager Karolin Seeger, who won’t take any crap from the Samba boys.

Allison says free software has a simply deployable record in attracting women engineers, much worst than proprietary software – if only because of the crudity FOSS developers exhibit –  and he thinks that’s a serious deficit.

Anyway, Samba 3.2, which is compatible with all existing Samba installations, represents a code shrink, Allison said, so it fits in network attached storage better. Samba is popular in NAS solutions, everything from high-end clustered business-critical systems to low-end consumer devices, and all the spots in between.

Its memory footprint was reduced by using a Samba-developed “talloc” library to accommodate embedded devices with limited memory requirements. All restrictions on file name lengths have been removed.

Samba 3.2 also introduces a registry-based configuration system to make it easier to embed in appliances and manage its configuration via the supplied commands or library functions without having to write scripts to modify a text file.

The team says that Samba 3.2, in conjunction with  the ctdb (http://ctdb.samba.org) libraries and a back-end distributed file system such as Sun’s Lustre, IBM’s GPFS, or Red Hat’s GFS, can provide a fully clustered file server solution. Every node can simultaneously serve an identical, consistent view of the exported file system. Not just a simple “fail-over” high-availability solution, Samba 3.2 with ctdb provides a scalable clustered file server solution with full Windows file-sharing semantics. Samba and ctdb are already being shipped in production file serving products to customers in fields such as animation and video production.

There’s supposed to be improved integration - with Windows and it’s been tested with the latest Windows clients - and servers, such as Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008.

The networking functions have been rewritten to ensure Samba 3.2 is fully IPv6-compliant. Customers can now use Samba in an IPv6-only network, and it has been tested to work with the Windows IPv6 implementations as well as Unix IPv6 implementations.

Samba 3.2 also begins Samba’s migration from a monolithic application to a more modular architecture comprised of library functions that can be used to control and configure the Samba environment. The new libnetapi library to control domain membership is one of the first examples of this new approach.

Samba is licensed under the GNU GPLv3. It was the first major open source project outside the Free Software Foundation to adopt the rewritten license last year.