At lot can happen in a year. This is certainly true of IPv6 and Samba. In this article, I summarise the progress made in IPv6 enabling Samba and review the current status of Samba and IPv6 support. Further details can be found in my presentation Configuring Samba 3/4 for IPv6 Operation with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.

Last year in my presentation at SambaXP 2007 (see SambaXP IPv6 Presentation) I showed how important it was that Samba catch up with Microsoft Windows in supporting IPv6. Microsoft’s latest operating systems, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (then codenamed Longhorn) are IPv6 enabled by default. The increasing drive to implement IPv6 in various parts of the world meant that Samba risked being kept out of, or dropped from, environments where IPv6 is required.

Since then a lot has changed. Here are some highlights from the last twelve months:

• First ever Linux CIFS client mount over IPv6 to Windows Server 2008
• First ever file sharing over IPv6 with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista using Samba 4
• First ever join over IPv6 of Windows Server 2008 to a Samba 4 domain
• Samba 3.2 is IPv6 enabled
• First ever join of Samba 3.2 to a Windows Server 2008 domain over IPv6
• Experimental IPv6 name resolution enabled in the Linux CIFS client mount.cifs command

Erion is proud to have carried out each of these firsts and being involved with Jermey Allison in IPv6 enabling Samba 3.2.

Linux CIFS Client

The Linux CIFS client has full support for IPv6 in the Linux kernel. This kernel is now widely available in the latest releases of many Linux distributions. At present, the mount command mount.cifs does not support IPv6 name resolution and the IPv6 address must be specified using a mount option. However, my patch to mount.cifs enables IPv6 name resolution. During Samba XP, I worked with Steve French and Jelmer Vernooij to improve support for IPv6 in mount.cifs. Friday evening found Jelmer still working on rewriting mount.cifs to include IPv6 support.

Samba 3.2

As Samba 3.2 nears a production release, it has been fully IPv6 enabled. This was a result of my presentation at CIFS Engineering Workshop held at Google last year. Erion has carried out the IPv6 testing for Samba 3.2. This has gone well and very few bugs have been found. During SambaXP Jeremy Allison put in time to investigate and resolve IPv6 bugs in Samba 3.2. Further information on IPv6 enabling Samba 3.2 can be found in our presentations from the Google IPv6 Conference earlier this year.

Samba 4

Support for IPv6 in Samba 4 still relies on my hack (a new version of which can be found here). The interest in IPv6 shown by the Samba team is illustrated by the time I spent with Andrew Tridgell. Andrew was very keen to incorporate my patch into the standard build of Samba 4. This would mean that, where possible, Samba 4 would build with IPv6 support as standard. The work was not completed by the end of SambaXP, but I will be chasing Andrew to complete it over the next few weeks.

In conclusion, SambaXP 2008 was a very positive event for IPv6 support in Samba. Much work still has to be done, but in the very near future there will be a solution for those who wish to upgrade Samba 3.0 to Samba 3.2 in order to get IPv6 support. So far most of the IPv6 testing of Samba has been undertaken by Erion. I would be very interested to hear of anyone else who is testing or even using Samba over IPv6 in live environments. During the conference Jelmer migrated his use of the Linux CIFS client in his home network to operate over IPv6! Now for the rest of the world…

The Linux CIFS client has had kernel support for IPv6 since early 2007. Up until now it has been necessary to specify an IPv6 address with the ip option. IPv6 name resolution was not supported.  A new patch from Erion’s David Holder provides IPv6 name resolution in the mount.cifs command.

The mount.cifs patch can be found at IPv6 Name Resolution Patch for Linux CIFS Client.  

In February 2008, IPv6 addresses were added for six of the world’s 13 root name servers. Now many country code top level domains (ccTLDs) also have IPv6 addresses.

This is a significant step for the widespread deployment of IPv6. Organisations can now, potentially, use only IPv6 for name resolution.

Erion has provided IPv6 consultancy and training to enable ccTLDs to IPv6 enable their domain name services. We have provided a mixture of advanced IPv6 deployment training, IPv6 security training, IPv6 implementation consultancy and IPv6 security consultancy.

Please contact us for further details.

We still have a limted number of places available on our 4-day Implementing IPv6 training course. The course is scheduled for 13th May 2008 in Basingstoke. Details can be found on our Course Schedule page.

The Samba team have released a new preview version of Samba 3.2. This version includes the changes that Jeremy Allision made to enable IPv6 support in Samba 3.2.

At last year CIFS workshop at Google, Erion’s David Holder gave a presentation on how to IPv6 enable Samba. As a result Jeremy took up the challenge to IPv6 enable Samba 3.2 in “three weeks”. Jeremy succeeded.

Erion’s testing of the IPv6 enabled version of Samba 3.2 produced very good results. A few minor changes were required in order to allow Samba 3.2 to join a Windows Server 2008 domain. Finally, in January 2008, Erion’s David Holder made the first ever IPv6 join to a Windows Server 2008 AD domain using Samba 3.2.

The presentation on IPv6 in Windows given by Erion’s David Holder at Google’s IPv6 conference is now available for viewing on YouTube. This talk covers the status of IPv6 on Windows and some key things that you need to know if you are working with IPv6 on Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008.

You can view the talk at by clicking here.

This week Erion’s David Holder spoke at an IPv6 conference at Google. The presentation was enititled IPv6 on Windows. It covered the status of IPv6 on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista as well as pointing out some of the details that you need to be aware of as Windows administrators and developers.

The slides are available for download here IPv6 on Windows.

Yesterday I carried out the first every join of a Samba 3.2 server to a Windows domain over IPv6.

At last year’s CIFS workshop at Google, I spoke about IPv6 enabling Samba (see Preparing Samba for Windows Server 2008 and IPv6). I pointed out that IPv6 enabling Samba would be a critical requirement in 2008. Two key factors make IPv6 enabling Samba by 2008 critical. The first is the mandate by the US Federal government for the use of IPv6 by 2008. The second is the imminent release of Windows Server 2008 which uses IPv6 by default.

Jeremy Allison claimed that he could IPv6 enable Samba 3.2 “in a few weeks”. I was sceptical but Jeremy set out and did indeed IPv6 enable Samba 3.2 in a matter of weeks. Since then I have been testing Samba 3.2 against Vista and Windows Server 2008. Amazingly, only a small number of bugs have been found so far. Of these few were actually IPv6 bugs.

Until a few days ago it was not possible to join Samba 3.2 to a Windows Server 2008 domain over IPv4 never mind IPv6. However, the Samba team (Jeremy, Andreas and Gerry) made a number of patches which eventually made it possible to join over IPv4. All that remained was to test it over IPv6. Once I had tested a join over IPv4 my first test over IPv6 was also successful. This is a major milestone for Samba. It will make it possible for organisations that have to move to IPv6 to continue to use Samba in their networks. It will also allow NAS box vendors to IPv6 enable their products.

Naturally, further testing is required. Furthermore, Samba 3.2 is still to be released for production use. However, I am now confident that an IPv6 enabled Samba will be available early this year. For those who need to test Samba over IPv6 you can begin testing now using the test tree of Samba 3.2. Please let me know if you have any questions.

At the recent CIFS Engineering Workshop at Google, Erion’s David Holder carried out the first ever Windows Server 2008 join of a Samba4 domain over IPv6.

Previously, whilst Samba4 listened on IPv6, only limited functionality worked over IPv6. Whilst file sharing worked over IPv6, many other operations did not. A hacked version of Samba4 now allows Windows Server 2008 to join and function in a Samba4 domain over IPv6. Much work is still to be done before Samba4 is production code, but significant progress has been made towards an IPv6 version of Samba.

This week Google are playing hosts to the CIFS Engineering Workshop. This event brings together in one place the developers of many CIFS client and server applications.

Erion’s David Holder gave a presentation entitled Preparing Samba for Windows Server 2008 and IPv6. This presentation covers how code can be ported to IPv6 and outlined the specific steps required to IPv6 enabled Samba3 and Samba4.