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From:	jra@samba.anu.edu.au
To:	Multiple recipients of list <samba-announce@samba.org>
Subject: Samba 2.0 released
Date:	Sat, 16 Jan 1999 16:08:38 +1100

Samba Team Releases Samba 2.0
                          =============================
                     World's Fastest Windows Server Software
                     =======================================


Canberra, Australia, January 1999. The Samba Team is pleased to
announce Samba 2.0, a major new release of the award winning Open
Source UNIX(R) file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows (R)
clients.



World's Fastest Windows File Server
-----------------------------------

Samba 2.0 has been benchmarked using the Ziff-Davis NetBench (R)
benchmarking suite, as the world's fastest Windows server, achieving
193 megabits per second file serving performance on a Silicon Graphics
(R) Origin 200 (R) server with 60 Windows clients.



Integration into Windows NT Domains
-----------------------------------

Samba 2.0 features the first non-Microsoft implementation of the Windows NT 
Domain authentication protocols, allowing a Samba 2.0 server to be seamlessly 
integrated into an existing Windows NT Domain. Samba 2.0 is free from client 
license fees and is the perfect way to add additional high performance Windows 
file servers using existing UNIX or low cost Linux(R) machines.



New Easy to use Administration
------------------------------

Samba 2.0 features the Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT) allowing a Samba 2.0 
server to be easily administered via any Web browser from any client. SWAT 
features an integrated help system and the ability to change user passwords on 
any Samba or Microsoft Windows NT (R) server.



Award Winning UNIX and Windows Integration
------------------------------------------

Samba won the Windows NT Systems Magazine 1998 "Exceptional Products
in Systems Management" award for Unix Connectivity Tools. In the
January 1999 awards issue Samba received the following praise :



     "Samba is solid, well documented, and feature rich. It is proof 
     that commercial quality software can be had for free."



The Leading Choice for Windows Connectivity
-------------------------------------------

Samba has been adopted by Silicon Graphics (R) as a supported product,
Samba for IRIX. Silicon Graphics said of Samba :



     "Samba for IRIX provides the best combination of features, 
     performance, and data integrity among the available software 
     solutions for serving files via the SMB/CIFS protocol from UNIX."



Samba is also the leading choice of "Thin Server" vendors, who
integrate Samba in their products to provide file service to Windows
desktops. Samba is used by leading vendors such as Cobalt Networks
Inc. in their Cobalt Qube (R) microserver, Whistle Communications (R)
in their Whistle InterJet (R) Internet connectivity solution, Corel
Computer Corp. (R) in their NetWinder (R) GS server, and by Realm
Information Technologies (R) in their REALM (R) Universal Server
product. Realm Information Technologies said of Samba :



     "REALM chose SAMBA for numerous reasons: it was Open Source, very 
     well supported, easily available and cost effective. Little did 
     we know that we were getting incredible performance and 
     stability. Our choice of SAMBA provides our customers with file 
     services that are some of the fastest available on the market 
     today."



Open Source Robustness and Flexibility
--------------------------------------

As an Open Source product, Samba 2.0 comes with the complete source
code to all components of the software. This leads to the legendary
Open Source software stability and complete customer flexibility
demanded in today's high availability file serving environments. In
addition, Samba 2.0 is commercially supported by a worldwide list of
corporations and consultants, competing to provide the customer with
world class customer support. A listing of support options is
available at http://www.samba.org.



Year 2000 Compliant
-------------------

Samba 2.0 is fully Y2K compliant.



Customer Testimonials
---------------------

Here's what some of our customers have to say about Samba.



Daniel Petzen of Ericsson Microwave Systems (a wholly owned subsidiary of 
Ericsson) writes :



     We've been running Samba for about a year and a half. We have 
     approximately 700 simultaneous users on 5 UNIX servers serving 
     different NT domains. On our main domain Samba-server we have 
     approximately 500 users and more than 900 connections during the 
     main part of working hours. The server (a Sun E450) is humming 
     along with an average workload of 0.15. None of the servers have 
     ever crashed or failed to function properly due to Samba. 
     Needless to say: We're quite, quite impressed over here. Thank 
     you for a wonderful program.



Dr. Curtis J. Hoff, President, Hoff and Associates, Inc., says :



     "Samba is the critical component enabling Hoff and Associates to 
     successfully migrate from an all Unix environment to a mixed NT 
     workstation / Unix compute server environment.  Ease of use, 
     performance, robustness and, of course, cost are some of Samba's 
     many strengths."



David Wolf, President, Computer Planet, says :



     "As RedHat's only Hardware Partner in Canada, we rely on Samba to 
     provide us with stable, secure, fast and error free 
     communications between our exclusive line of Linux servers and 
     our customer's legacy Windows systems. Samba is perhaps the finest 
     product we have encountered in a long, long time. It does what it 
     says it does--in fact, it works better and faster than the native 
     Windows NT file sharing capabilities!" 



Chris Peck, Computer Systems Engineer, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, 
VA says :



     "The College of William and Mary began testing Samba in the 
     Spring of 1998.  Our test worked out so well that we decided to 
     implement it throughout the campus in time for the Fall semester 
     of 1998. The combination of Unix and Samba has more than met our 
     goals of providing an extremely flexible and robust environment.  
     We are currently using Samba to serve 10755 users on 2800 client 
     machines."



Getting Samba 2.0
-----------------

Samba 2.0 is available now from the Samba Web site and all worldwide mirrors.

http://www.samba.org

Samba 2.0 is fully portable, POSIX compliant software that runs on a
variety of UNIX and UNIX-like systems including AIX (R), DG/UX (R),
FreeBSD, HPUX(R), IRIX (R), Linux(R), SCO OpenServer (R), Solaris (R),
and UnixWare (R).



About the Samba Team
--------------------

The Samba Team is a worldwide group of computer professionals working together 
via the Internet to produce the highest quality Open Source Windows protocol 
(SMB/CIFS) server software. They may be contacted at the email address : 

  samba-bugs@samba.org.


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                 | Samba - "Opening Windows to a Wider World" |
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