Samba AD: Our participation in the development

by | Apr 26, 2019 | Active Directory, samba

In previous articles, we have presented you in detail the story of Samba Active Directory. From its evolution towards Active Directory to the new features of Samba 4.10, we didn’t forget any details… Or almost! Indeed, the history of Samba Active Directory cannot be complete without mentioning the close relationship between the Samba Team and the Tranquil IT team! Discover how and why we have contributed to the financing and development of Samba AD!

Our meeting with the Samba Active Directory team

It is in 2014, after two years of testing the first versions of Samba-AD, that our story with the Samba Team really began. Our strong interest in the software lead us to offer migration and training services to our customers to train them on the tool. Our desire was already to democratize this alternative to Microsoft Active Directory in France!

Samba Active Directory really deserves a lot of love and a little money. It was the French Ministry of the Environment that decided to launch the first round of funding. After having switched the Central Bank of West African States to Samba-AD, we also convinced it to contribute to the financing of Samba’s development. What?!! Paying for Free Software? Yes, it’s possible!

We therefore sought to meet the team from Catalyst, the company that employs the main developers of the Active Directory function in Samba. Tranquil IT finally got Andrew BARTLETT‘s contact through Jeremy ALLISON (one of Samba’s founders), and this event marked the beginning of our collaboration.

In 2015, Tranquil IT participated, for the first time, with Samba XP, the annual gathering of Samba developers, organized by the German company SerNet. This event immediately become an annual ritual for our team and in only take two short years Tranquil IT obtained the privileged status of “Vendor”. This advantage allows, for example, Tranquil IT to receive information on vulnerabilities in Samba upstream of the public. You know, it’s sometimes nice to be treated equally with IBM and RedHat.

Samba AD improvements funded by Tranquil IT

The relationship we have forged with Catalyst has enabled us to carry out ambitious projects with the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO), the French Ministry of Culture, the General Directorate of Public Finance (DGFIP) and the French Ministry of the Environment (MTES). Thus, Tranquil IT has been a helping hand of regarding financing for Samba-AD:

Samba 4.4.0 :

  • Support of the Last Login / Last Logoff – by the Central Bank of West African States.

Samba 4.7.0 :

  • Support of the read-only domain controller – by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication.
  • Support of hash-based passwords according to several encryption protocols – by the French Ministry of the Environment.

Samba 4.9.0 :

  • Support of the Automatic Site Coverage to allow small sites to operate without an AD server – by the French Ministry of the Environment.
  • Support of Samba logs in JSON (EVENT_ID) for a better integration in SIEM – by the French Ministry of Environment.
  • Import and export of GPOs – by the French Ministry of the Environment.
  • Improvement of DNS management – by the French Ministry of Public Finance.
  • Support for 64bit LMDB databases to remove the historical technical lock of the 4Gb storage of AD objects – by the French Ministry of Public Finance.
  • Graphical tools to help understand replication topologies in complex domains – by the French Ministry of Public Finance.
  • Documentation of Samba Active Directory security functions – by the National Information Systems Security Agency.

Samba 4.10 : By the General Directorate of Public Finance

  • Ability to export GPOs in a generalized XML file, add new audit events (EVENT_ID).
  • Pre-fork management for the KDC.
  • Support for NETLOGON pre-fork processes for DCERPC.
  • Prise en charge des processus NETLOGON pré-fork pour le DCERPC.
  • Modification of the behaviour of the paged results control to better adapt to Windows servers.

Discover the migrations we have carried out!

With more than 50,000 users, we are able to adapt to all infrastructures.
Discover the experiences of your peers!

The result of this collaboration is Tranquil IT’s unique expertise in Europe on Samba Active Directory. We npw provide both domain migration and Samba AD skills transfer. This expertise is reflected in more than 300 projects conducted in Europe, with more than 50,000 users who rely on Samba Active Directory on a daily basis to work in their companies. A small victory that we intend to make grow over time!

As you can see, we are proud of what we have accomplished around Samba-AD, including the number of features we have helped to finance. For the future, we hope to keep the pace we have set since Samba 4.9. We will not hesitate to update this article. We are counting on you to follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn so that you don’t miss the rest of the adventure!

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