Today, March 22, 2016, the Samba development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first release in the Samba 4.4 series.

Samba is an open-source, free, and cross-platform software piece that can be used on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X operating systems to communicate with Windows network shares. It aims to reimplement the SMB/CIFS networking protocol on UNIX platforms, thus allowing users to access network shared folders and files from Windows OSes.

Samba 4.4 is a major release, and among the most prominent features included, we can mention support for asynchronous flush requests, the addition of a GnuTLS-based backupkey implementation, multiple Active Directory (AD) improvements, a WINS nsswitch module, lots of CTDB changes, and experimental SMB3 Multi-Channel support.

"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," read the release notes, which we recommend reading in full if you're curious to know what exactly has been changed in Samba 4.4.

The samba-tool command in Samba 4.4 has learned new tricks, and we can't help but notice the addition of the '--remove-other-dead-server' option to the 'samba-tool domain demote' subcommand. Moreover, there is support for the 'samba-tool sites' subcommand to run against another server, as well as the 'samba-tool drs clone-dc-database' subcommand for replicating an initial clone of a domain.

But there are numerous other small improvements in Samba 4.4, and it would be impractical for us to list them all here. You'll notice small changes to components like pdbedit, smbstatus, smbget, the s4-rpc_server, ntlm_auth, vfs_offline, KCC, the Samba DNS server, etc. Also, some components have been removed in this release, such as the public headers, vfs_smb_traffic_analyzer, and vfs_scannedonly.

Download the Samba 4.4 sources right now from Softpedia.