Samba 4.7.0 (Samba AD for the Enterprise)

Enterprise distributions like Red Hat or SUSE are required to ship with MIT Kerberos. The reason is that several institutions or governments have a hard requirement for a special Kerberos implementation. It is the reason why the distributions by these vendors (Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE, SLES) only package Samba FS and not the AD component.

To get Samba AD into RHEL some day it was clear, that we need to port it to MIT Kerberos.

In 2013 we started to think about this. The question which arise first was: How do we run the tests if we port to MIT Kerberos? We want to start the krb5kdc daemon. This was more or less the birth of the cwrap project! Think of cwrap like it is “The Matrix” where reality is simulated and everything is a lie. It allows us to create an artificial environment emulating a complete network to test Samba. It took nearly a year till we were able to integrate the first part of cwrap, socket_wrapper, into Samba.

Then the work to port Samba AD to MIT Kerberos started. We created a simple abstraction of Samba KDC routines so we could convert between Heimdal and MIT Kerberos. Then created a MIT KDB module and were able to start the krb5kdc process.

In 2015 we had more than 140 patches for Samba AD ready and pushed most of them upstream in April. We still had 70 testsuites failing. We started to implement missing features and fixed tests to work with MIT Kerberos tools. During that time we often had setbacks because features in MIT Kerboros were missing which we required. So we started to implement missing features in MIT Kerberos.

In September of 2015 we started to implement missing pieces in ‘samba-tool’ to provision a domain with MIT Kerberos involved. Till the end of the year we implemented the backup key protocol using GnuTLS (which also needed to add features for us first).

From January till July 2016 we implemented more features in MIT Kerberos to get everything working. In August we had most of the stuff working just the trust support wasn’t working. From there we discovered bug after bug in the implementation how trusts are handled and fixed bug by bug. We had to do major rewrites of code in order to get everything working correctly. The outcome was great. We improved our trust code and got MIT Kerberos working in the end.

2017-04-30

That’s the day when I pushed the final patchset to our source code repository!

It took Günther Deschner, Stefan Metzmachen and me more than 4 years to implement Samba AD with MIT Kerberos. Finally with the release Samba 4.7.0 it is available for everyone out there.

Fedora 27 will be the first version with Samba AD.