For those who might require more polished release notes, here's the text of the press release I sent out to the magazines :-). Regards, Jeremy Allison, Samba Team. -------------------------------------------------------- Samba Team Announces Samba 1.9.18 ================================ Canberra, Australia, January 1998 - The Samba Team is pleased to announce version 1.9.18 of Samba, the leading file and print server suite for corporate network integration with Microsoft Windows (tm) clients. Speed and Internationalization Improvements. -------------------------------------------- With this release, Samba becomes one of the fastest available SMB/CIFS file servers, out-performing many commercial alternatives. Samba now implements the opportunistic locking features of the SMB/CIFS protocol. This can improve file access performance by an order of magnitude over previous versions. Samba has been internally benchmarked as faster than commercially available SMB servers on the same hardware platforms. Samba now provides for dynamic code page support, allowing easy roll-out of servers within an international organization. Samba now allows network administrators to configure the way clients view internationalized filenames on a server-by-server basis. Servers with multiple network interfaces are now fully supported by Samba in the same way as Microsoft Windows NT (tm) servers, allowing network administrators to easily load-balance client accesses over all available bandwidth. Samba also provides automatic downloading of printer drivers for Microsoft Windows 95 (tm) clients, allowing it to completely replace Microsoft Windows NT servers for both file and printer services. Samba has no client license fees, and may be used without cost on any compatible server operating system (most versions of UNIX). Samba is the clear choice for robust, scalable, file and print services for Microsoft Windows clients and is used by thousands of corporations worldwide, as a mission-critical part of their networking infrastructure. For a list of the companies that use Samba, open your browser on the URL: http://samba.anu.edu.au/samba/survey/ To purchase commercial support for Samba, open your browser on the URL: ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/Support.txt About the Samba File and Print Server program. ---------------------------------------------- Designed to service any Server Message Block (SMB) file sharing client, Samba is compatible with all Microsoft Networking clients including Windows 95 (tm), Windows NT (tm) Workstation and Server, Windows for Workgroups (tm), IBM OS/2 (tm), smbfs for Linux and Thursby Software Systems DAVE (tm) Macintosh SMB client. Samba also functions as a logon server for Windows 95 and supports roving profiles. Samba can provide support for over 2,000 clients simultaneously per samba server and many Samba servers of this scale can work together. Samba is distinguished by its scalability, speed and flexibility. It is freely distributed with source code, and has high-quality support. Over a hundred specialist support companies worldwide offer commercial support for Samba, which is also supported by copious Internet resources and a mailing list with ten thousand subscribers. Samba is developed by a team of international developers, in the same manner as the Linux operating system, and is shipped as standard with most versions of Linux. With many hundreds of thousands of installed systems around the world, Samba is making it possible for many kinds of systems to share files that have been incompatible until now. Samba implements the Common Internet Filesystem protocol, the Internet Engineering Task Force draft protocol for extending SMB to the Internet. Samba keeps pace with CIFS developments. See http://samba.anu.edu.au/cifs. Samba runs on UNIX (tm) and near clones from over 30 vendors, besides IBM MVS (tm), Digital Equipment VMS (tm), Stratos VOS (tm), all versions of IBM OS/2 Warp (tm), Novell Netware (tm), Amiga OS (tm) and others. Most corporate data servers are supported, besides countless small networks running less powerful operating systems. Windows NT, Windows 95, Linux, OS/2 Warp, Windows for Workgroups come with SMB network file systems by default. Windows 3.1, DOS, AIX and others have equivalent add-ons. Different SMB clients have different extensions and different bugs. Samba goes to great lengths to accommodate all clients that are in use. More Information and Downloading -------------------------------- For more information on Samba see http://samba.canberra.edu.au/pub/samba Demand for Samba is very high. For a faster download and to minimize Internet traffic over the period following this release, please use a Samba mirror site. The list of mirror sites is contained in ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/MIRRORS.txt. The official master ftp location is ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/samba-latest.tar.gz Some of the products mentioned in this document are registered trademarks of other companies. The samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au address referred to in this release should not be used for general enquiries or support requests. See the web pages for information about the general Samba mailing list and a listing of commercial support providers. Thanks ------ This release of Samba was made possible with the generous help of the following companies : Aquasoft Pty Ltd. : http://www.aquasoft.com.au Digital Equipment Corp. : http://www.digital.com NEC Technologies (UK) : http://www.nec.com Red Hat Software. : http://www.redhat.com Silicon Graphics, Inc. : http://www.sgi.com Sun Microsystems, Inc. : http://www.sun.com Whistle Communications : http://www.whistle.com Please note that this does not imply endorsement of Samba by the above named companies. Samba Team members ------------------ The Samba Team are : Jeremy Allison - Whistle Communications Paul Ashton - Paul Blackman - University of Canberra John Blair - University of Alabama Dave Fenwick - Asset Software Chris Hertel - University of Minnisota Simon Hyde - Peter Kelly - ETS Luke Leighton - Creative Programmer, Developer and Consultant Eckert Meyer - Technical University of Braunschweig Richard Sharpe - NS Computer Software Dan Shearer - University of South Australia John Terpstra - Aquasoft Pty Ltd. Andrew Tridgell - Australian National University Volker Lendeke - Service Network, GmbH. Copying ------- Unrestricted reproduction rights of this press release are granted, so long as it remains clear that: i) Samba is copyright by the Samba Team, 1992-1997 ii) Samba is made available freely under the widely-used GNU public license. A copy of this is at ftp://samba.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/COPYING This license encourages commercial use and modification. The only restriction is that all source code incorporating Samba must always be freely available iii) The contact for all issues related to intellectual property rights for Samba is samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au