Kernel 2.6 : more performance and Reliability

The significant enhancements are:

 Improved scalability to 16 CPUs or more, with improved performance, using the new O(1) scheduler
 Improved file-system performance, with full inclusion for four journaling file systems (Ext3, ReiserFS, JFS and XFS) for real-time data backup and recovery capabilities.
 Improved threading support
 Added memory support up to 64GB
 Enhanced disk drive performance and storage access
 Enjoy low latency support especially for Studio-quality sound
 Support for USB 2.0.
 Firewire and much more!

   Samba 3

 Active Directory support (LDAP / Kerberos)
Samba 3.0 is now able to join a ADS realm as a member server and authenticate users using native Active Directory support.

 Unicode support
Samba will now negotiate UNICODE on the wire and internally there is now a much better infrastructure for multi-byte and UNICODE character sets. It greatly simplifies supporting international languages.

 New authentication system
The internal authentication system has been almost completely rewritten. Most of the changes are internal, but the new authentication system is also very configurable and supports LDAP account storage out-of-the-box. Support for storing samba account details in XML files (mainly for backup purposes) and MySQL is available by installing the samba-passdb-xml and samba-passdb-mysql packages respectively.

When using the LDAP backend, you can also support domain groups, and map unix groups to Windows domain groups (required for the migration of NTdomains to Samba/LDAP). It should also be possible to use the Windows user management tools (User Manager for Domains for Windows NT) on Windows clients to manage groups and users.

 Full support for client and server SMB signing to ensure compatibility with default Windows 2003 security settings.

It allows:
1) Clients to access resources on Windows 2003 servers
2) the joining of Windows XP machines to a samba domain without any configuration changes on the XP clients.
3) Allows samba servers in Windows domains to serve WindowsXP clients without reducing security setting

 Samba now negotiates NT-style status32 codes on the wire This improves error handling a lot.

   Tool to migrate from Samba 2 to Samba 3

 Backup any existing smb.conf
 Merge the settings in this file into a new smb.conf
 Converting any syntax changes needed between samba2 to samba3
 Including the administrator's custom settings in the new configuration file. All merged/modified lines are preceded by a comment so the user knows what took place.
Furthermore, a summary of the changes are written in /var/log/samba/smb-migrate.log.