XPost: linux.samba

Release Announcements
=====================

This is the first release candidate of Samba 4.4. This is *not*
intended for production environments and is designed for testing
purposes only. Please report any defects via the Samba bug reporting
system at https://bugzilla.samba.org/.

Samba 4.4 will be the next version of the Samba suite.


UPGRADING
=========

Nothing special.


NEW FEATURES/CHANGES
====================

Asynchronous flush requests
---------------------------

Flush requests from SMB2/3 clients are handled asynchronously and do
not block the processing of other requests. Note that 'strict sync'
has to be set to 'yes' for Samba to honor flush requests from SMB
clients.

s3: smbd
--------

Remove '--with-aio-support' configure option. We no longer would ever prefer POSIX-RT aio, use pthread_aio instead.

samba-tool sites
----------------

The 'samba-tool sites' subcommand can now be run against another server by specifying an LDB URL using the '-H' option and not against the local database only (which is still the default when no URL is given).

samba-tool domain demote
------------------------

Add '--remove-other-dead-server' option to 'samba-tool domain demote' subcommand. The new version of this tool now can remove another DC that is itself offline. The '--remove-other-dead-server' removes as many references
to the DC as possible.

samba-tool drs clone-dc-database
--------------------------------

Replicate an initial clone of domain, but do not join it.
This is developed for debugging purposes, but not for setting up another DC.

pdbedit
-------

Add '--set-nt-hash' option to pdbedit to update user password from nt-hash hexstring. 'pdbedit -vw' shows also password hashes.

smbstatus
---------

'smbstatus' was enhanced to show the state of signing and encryption for sessions and shares.

s4-rpc_server
-------------

Add a GnuTLS based backupkey implementation.

ntlm_auth
---------

Using the '--offline-logon' enables ntlm_auth to use cached passwords when the DC is offline.

Allow '--password' force a local password check for ntlm-server-1 mode.

vfs_offline
-----------

A new VFS module called vfs_offline has been added to mark all files in the share as offline. It can be useful for shares mounted on top of a remote file system (either through a samba VFS module or via FUSE).

KCC
---

The Samba KCC has been improved, but is still disabled by default.

DNS
---

There were several improvements concerning the Samba DNS server.

Active Directory
----------------

There were some improvements in the Active Directory area.

WINS nsswitch module
--------------------

The WINS nsswitch module has been rewritten to address memory issues and to simplify the code. The module now uses libwbclient to do WINS queries. This means that winbind needs to be running in order to resolve WINS names using
the nss_wins module. This does not affect smbd.

CTDB changes
------------

* CTDB now uses a newly implemented parallel database recovery scheme
that avoids deadlocks with smbd.

In certain circumstances CTDB and smbd could deadlock. The new
recovery implementation avoid this. It also provides improved
recovery performance.

* All files are now installed into and referred to by the paths
configured at build time. Therefore, CTDB will now work properly
when