Samba’s Way Toward SMB 3.0

The well-known Samba software has been a pioneer in clustered Server Message Block (SMB) file sharing since 2007. With Windows 8 and Server 2012, Microsoft has released version 3.0 of the SMB protocol, introducing a whole set of new features for all-active SMB clustering and server workloads. This article describes the interesting challenges that Samba faces in implementing SMB 3 and the missing features of SMB 2—most notably durable file handles—and provides details about the techniques used to solve the issues.