14 DAY TRIAL // Samba 4.5 has been released and it is the latest, newest stable branch of the free widely-used, cross-platform, and open-source software project that re-implements the SMB/CIFS networking protocol on UNIX-like platforms.
Samba is being used by default in numerous, if not all GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as on Apple's macOS, to allow users to access network shares from other computers that run Microsoft Windows and to interact with them to exchange any file format that exists today.
As expected, Samba 4.5 is a massive release, which not only resolves many of the issues from previous versions but also introduces a bunch of new features and enhancements to make this open source software even more reliable and secure. As such, to improve security, Samba 4.5 comes with NTLMv1 authentication disabled by default.
"In order to improve security we have changed the default value for the 'ntlm auth' option from 'yes' to 'no'. This may have impact on very old clients which doesn't support NTLMv2 yet. The primary user of NTLMv1 is MSCHAPv2 for VPNs and 802.1x. By default, Samba will only allow NTLMv2 via NTLMSSP now," read the release notes.
The many features of Samba 4.5
Prominent new features of Samba 4.5 include support for the LDAP_SERVER_NOTIFICATION_OID control to the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory service protocol, as well as improvements to the KCC component to add sparse network replication support.
There's also DRS Replication support for the Active Directory Domain Controller (AD DC), implementation of Virtual List View (VLV) to page the LDAP directory, two new options, namely "--local-online" and "--async-op" were added to the "samba-tool drs replicate" command, and deleted objects now have linked attributes for Active Directory.
The list of changes continues with new options for the shadow_copy2 command, namely shadow:snapprefix and shadow:delimiter, lots of improvements to the CTDB protocol, several SmartCard/PKINIT improvements, password sync support as Active Directory domain controller, and samba-tool improvements.
Last but not least, Samba 4.5 brings performance improvements to AD DC (Active Directory Domain Controller) and replPropertyMetaData, support for tombstone reanimation and multiple DNS Forwarders on the AD DC feature, enabled SMB 2.1 leases by default, and Open File Description (OFD) locks. Download Samba 4.5.0.