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Active Directory support. This release is able to join an ADS realm as a member server and authenticate users using LDAP/kerberos.
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Unicode support. Samba will now negotiate unicode on the wire and internally there is a much better infrastructure for multi-byte and unicode character sets.
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New authentication system. The internal authentication system has been almost completely rewritten. Most of the changes are internal, but the new authoring system is also very configurable.
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New filename mangling system. The filename mangling system has been completely rewritten. An internal database now stores mangling maps persistently.
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New " net " command. A new " net " command has been added. It is somewhat similar to the " net " command in Windows. Eventually, we plan to replace a bunch of other utilities (such as smbpasswd) with subcommands in " net ".
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Samba now negotiates NT-style status32 codes on the wire. This considerably improves error handling.
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Better Windows 200x/XP printing support including publishing printer attributes in Active Directory.
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New loadable RPC modules for passdb backends and character sets.
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New default dual-daemon winbindd support for better performance.
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Support for migrating from a Windows NT 4.0 domain to a Samba domain and maintaining user , group and domain SIDs.
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Support for establishing trust relationships with Windows NT 4.0 Domain Controllers.
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Initial support for a distributed Winbind architecture using an LDAP directory for storing SID to UID/GID mappings.
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Major updates to the Samba documentation tree.
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Full support for client and server SMB signing to ensure compatibility with default Windows 2003 security settings.