The Samba team at SerNet GmbH has reached the second milestone (2/17) in the Sovereign Tech Agency.-funded project to enhance Samba’s functionality and interoperability. This milestone focuses on introducing SMB3 Directory Leases, a feature designed to improve performance and efficiency when working with shared files and folders. With this implementation, clients can establish leases on directories, enabling caching of directory contents, reducing network overhead for directory metadata operations, and enhanced responsiveness in shared environments.
The development team conducted in-depth research and testing to ensure compatibility with Microsoft's SMB3 implementation. This led to the identification of multiple bugs and deficiencies in Samba. As a result, the team thoroughly investigated the current SMB2 Leases implementation in Samba, fixing all bugs and enhancing Samba's continuous integration testing framework with rigorous testing.
This highlights the team’s commitment to maintaining seamless interoperability between Samba and Microsoft environments, a cornerstone of the project’s objectives.
The work on this milestone has been published and will be available in the public Samba repositories:
This achievement, like others in the project, ensures that the open-source community and organizations relying on Samba benefit from new features and robust cross-platform compatibility. The ongoing funding secured by SerNet and assigned by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA, formerly known as Sovereign Tech Fund) enables these advancements, underscoring the collaborative effort behind the project.
For further information about the project, visit https://samba.plus/stf-project. The project is a long-term initiative aimed at strengthening Samba’s role as a critical open-source software for file sharing, interoperability, and identity access management. Over the course of 18 months, the project will complete 17 milestones to enhance Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality. Each milestone’s results are made publicly available, ensuring that the wider open-source community and IT infrastructures worldwide can benefit.
