AD Everywhere: Active Directory Where You Wouldn't Expect It, using Samba 4.0

Andrew will highlight the key features of the Samba 4.0 project for NAS vendors, cloud operators and anyone else with an imagination for taking the industry's dominant LAN authentication technology into places it hasn't been thought practical before.

With features like our RODC functionality, Samba 4.0 can bring AD to NAS devices operating as the only server at a remote site, or into the cloud, with the customer in control of how far they trust each new extension of the network. With full access to the AD DRS replication protocol, Samba implementers can avoid custom and painful 'password filter' solutions while keeping user passwords in sync.

Andrew will also cover the broader Samba 4.0 release, the culmination of years of effort to bring our production file server and AD DC development streams together. Under this single release is also a SMB3 file server, print server, client libraries, python libraries and may other great things. These two have been taken to places we would never have imagined, such as underpinning the OpenChange Exchange client the FreeIPA project.

No matter what your interest, Samba remains your single source for Microsoft networking interoperability solutions

Learning Objectives

Understand the key features of Samba 4.0 for NAS Vendors and cloud operators
Reinforce that this is a continuation of great work of the Samba file server
Imagine the possibilities brought on by using the RODC feature on sites 'too small' to have an AD DC.