# "Best" SAMBA version for FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE + ZFS?



## Terry_Kennedy (May 14, 2016)

[I posted the attached to freebsd-questions@, but as there haven't been any replies in a week, I figured I'd ask here, in the hope of reaching a different audience. I've added forum tags and adjusted some date references, but other than that, this is the same post.]

I will be updating systems from older FreeBSD versions with the net/samba36 port to 10.3-STABLE and a newer SAMBA port.

https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/FAQ says "The most recent release is always the recommended version for production use." net/samba44 just hit the ports tree [a week ago], with a commit message of "Port is NOT fully tested, don't use in the production(yet)." As far as I can tell, all of the samba4* ports have the "WARNING! This port is still experimental" note in their README.FreeBSD.in files.

Complicating things is that SAMBA is currently serving large ZFS pools (ranging from 32TB to 128TB) to Windows clients. There are various warnings about ZFS in the samba4* ports, but they seem to be related to provisioning and possibly ZFS-on-root. Is this likely to affect me?

Also, what is the status of the "inconsistent directory on rename / delete"? A year or so ago I was following this discussion on the SAMBA lists. It seemed that the prevailing point of view was "your operating system is broken" because FreeBSD doesn't guarantee the same file order when re-traversing a directory after a deletion. Various patches were proposed for this, but I stopped following the discussion before the issue got resolved (if it did get resolved).

Considering all of the above, what is the current best version for SAMBA deployment on 10.3-STABLE? Should I wait some time and then try net/samba44? Go with net/samba43 now? Something else?


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## von_Gaden (May 14, 2016)

I use Samba widely because of mostly windows-based clients I have to deal with.
If you use Samba without AD DC integration it's not important which version of the port you use. In this case you can't edit directory ACLS from Windows Explorer and you can simply install the new version (in my cases mostly net/samba43). You should copy everything form /var/db/samba to /var/db/samba4 and from /usr/local/etc/samba to /var/db/samba4/privte. The config file /usr/local/etc/smb.conf should be copied to /usr/local/etc/smb4.conf. This is tested and working on some of my servers.

If you use active directory integration you have to install latest possible Samba. In fact versions prior Samba 4.3 have issues and config from 4.0 or 4.1 causes big troubles in 4.3 (file locking, duplicate files in windows explorer, etc.). In this case you can set ACLs from windows explorer and you should use `zfsacl` VFS object.


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## Terry_Kennedy (May 15, 2016)

von_Gaden said:


> I use Samba widely because of mostly windows-based clients I have to deal with.
> If you use Samba without AD DC integration it's not important which version of the port you use. In this case you can't edit directory ACLS from Windows Explorer and you can simply install the new version (in my cases mostly net/samba43). You should copy everything form /var/db/samba to /var/db/samba4 and from /usr/local/etc/samba to /var/db/samba4/privte. The config file /usr/local/etc/smb.conf should be copied to /usr/local/etc/smb4.conf. This is tested and working on some of my servers.


Thanks. I went with the net/samba43 port as net/samba44 failed to install (file rfc-something-or-other not found in staging). Some quick testing shows 4.3 to be a good bit faster than 3.6.


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