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The developers of the Samba 4 version have released the second alpha version three months after the initial alpha.
In their announcment the developers warn users not to deploy the version in production environments. Although many of the second alpha version's elements work well, some critical functionality is still missing.
Samba 4 was mainly designed to support the Active Directory protocols used by Windows 2000 and later. Samba founder Andrew Tridgell announced at Samba XP 2007 that Samba 4 will be able to act both as a domain controller and as a member server for Active Directory. As the developers revealed in the release notes for the second alpha, Samba 4 is much happier to play the domain controller role. The developers have spent most of their time working on this.
Samba 4 can handle the server side actions for Active Directory logon by Windows 2000 computers or computers with later Windows versions. The Release Notes include a list of changes. If you are interested in installing Samba 4 alpha for test purposes, much help is available from the Wiki. The source code tarball is available on the projects download page, with Debian packages to follow soon.
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