Samba AD: Our participation in the development

In previous articles, we presented you in detail the story of Samba Active Directory. From its evolution in 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 begins. Our strong interest in the software leads us to offer migration and training services to our customers to train us 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 is the French Ministry of the Environment that will decide to launch a 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). This event will mark the beginning of our collaboration.

In 2015, Tranquil IT participates for the first time in Samba XP, the annual gathering of Samba developers organized by the German company SerNet. This event will immediately become an annual ritual for our team. It will only take two short years for Tranquil IT to obtain 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.

Improvement to Samba AD 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) or the French Ministry of the Environment (MTES). Thus, Tranquil IT has been a vector of numerous financings 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  (RODC) – 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.

The result of this collaboration is Tranquil IT’s unique expertise in Samba Active Directory in Europe. We handle both domain migrations and knowledge transfer on Samba Active Directory equally well. This expertise is demonstrated by over 300 projects completed across Europe, supporting more than 50,000 users who rely daily on Samba Active Directory to operate within their organizations. It’s a small victory that we aim to grow over time!

As you can see, we take pride in what we have achieved with Samba AD, especially in terms of the number of features we have helped fund. Looking ahead, we hope to maintain the momentum we have established since Samba AD 4.9. We will not hesitate to update this article as necessary. We rely on your support to follow our journey on Twitter and LinkedIn as we continue our Samba adventure!