The free Samba project has just released version 3.2 of the file and printer server for Microsoft Windows clients. The team will be moving to the GPL v3 license as of this version.

Samba 3.2 is based on the version 3.0 codebase and retains compatibility with existing Samba installations. The latest version was announced by the new release manager Karolin Seeger, who was work is sponsored by German service provider Sernet.

The major innovations pointed to by the developer include reduced memory requirements, support for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) and a simpler Registry-based configuration. By preselecting commands and library entries, users can configure appliances without the need for scripting.

On top of this Version 3.2 supports fileservers in scalable clusters thanks to a combination of the Ctdb libraries with an additional filesystem such as Sun Lustre, Red Hat Global File System (GFS), or IBM GPFS. Libraries have been migrated to a modular architecture. The developers cite the Libnetapi library, which supports domain membership management, as an example. According to the project team integration with current Windows versions, such as Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2008 is improved. As a futher innovation, the developers cite encrypted data transport using GSSAPI on the network.

Version 3.2 sees the free project move to Version 3 of the General Public License (GPL). Samba 3.2 is available for downloading from the project website. Parellel to this, the developers are working Samba 4.0, which will provide a Linux-based Active Directory Controller and is scheduled for completion early in 2009.

The free Samba project has just released version 3.2 of the file and printer server for Microsoft Windows clients. The team will be moving to the GPL v3 license as of this version.