14 DAY TRIAL // Today, June 7, 2016, the Samba development team has announced the immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release in the Samba 4.4 series.
Samba is a free, cross-platform, and open-source software project that re-implements the SMB/CIFS networking protocol on UNIX platforms. It is used by default in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as on Mac OS X, to allow users to access and interact with Windows network shares.
Samba 4.4 major branch was launched on March 22, 2016, and it brought support for asynchronous flush requests, several Active Directory (AD) enhancements, a GnuTLS-based backupkey implementation, multiple CTDB (Cluster Trivial Database) improvements, a WINS nsswitch module, as well as experimental SMB3 Multi-Channel support.
Samba 4.4.4 comes five weeks since the previous point release, Samba 4.4.3, which resolved various regressions introduced in Samba 4.4.2. However, Samba 4.4.4 is here to fix a total of 31 bugs that have been discovered and reported by various developers and users. The most important one was a memory leak in share mode locking. Also, there's now support for the systemd 230 init system on Linux.
Samba 4.4.4 coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you
As mentioned before, Samba 4.4.4 is a small maintenance release that introduces no new features or other improvements, as it only fixes bugs. Below, we've attached the full release notes for our tech-savvy readers who are curious to know what exactly has been changed in this fourth point release of Samba 4.4.
Samba 4.4.4 is now available for download as a source archive via our website, where you'll also find a gzipped patch against Samba 4.4.3 if you don't have time to compile the entire release. However, we recommend waiting for your GNU/Linux distribution to update their Samba packages to version 4.4.4. Please update as soon as possible to patch the issues noted in the changelog.