The agenda for sambaXP 2026 is now online on the conference website. On April 20 and 21, the 25th edition of the international Samba conference will bring developers, users and vendors to Göttingen, Germany, for two days of technical exchange around Samba, SMB and interoperability. Organized by SerNet since 2002, this year’s conference is supported by Microsoft, Tranquil IT, SerNet and SAMBA+.
The program opens with Volker Lendecke’s “A Quarter Century of sambaXP” and then moves quickly into the questions shaping Samba development today. That is especially visible in the strong Samba-AD and security track. Talks on the evolution of Samba-AD, recent advances in Samba AD security, and practical approaches to moving beyond NTLM reflect a project that is long past its experimental phase and is now being discussed in terms of resilience, authentication and fit in complex production environments.
The file-serving and protocol side of the agenda is equally substantial. Sessions on SMB3 Persistent Handles, SMB over QUIC, SMB-Direct, SMB Multichannel, SMB3 POSIX Extensions, Ceph RGW access via Samba, and ongoing changes in the Samba VFS point to a program grounded in implementation details, performance questions and interoperability work across a changing ecosystem.
By the end of the second day, the focus has shifted clearly forward. Tom Talpey’s closing session, “The Future of SMB3,” takes a look at the protocol’s next phase. This year’s conference may not only revisit what has been achieved and what is currently being built, but also hint at what will give the project fresh momentum in the years ahead.
And as always, sambaXP is not just about talks: the event is a space for discussion and exchange. Beyond the main conference, the week also includes the SNIA SMB3 Interoperability (IO) Lab EMEA from April 21 to 23 and the Himmelblau Workshop on April 22. The IO Lab is hosted by SNIA and sponsored by Microsoft. The Himmelblau session will be led by David Mulder and focuses on integrating Linux clients into Entra ID and managing them in Intune with the current stable version of Himmelblau. Given Mulder’s work on Entra ID authentication and Himmelblau, the workshop reads as a particularly timely addition to the week – and, notably, as his first dedicated workshop at sambaXP on one of the most actively debated current topics in Linux identity integration.
The full agenda is now available: https://sambaxp.org.
