Samba 4.23 Unveiled: QUIC Support, Unix Extensions, and Prometheus Integration

New Features in Samba 4.23

After more than six months of development, the open‑source community released Samba 4.23 on September 16. This update enhances network security and efficiency, notably by adding QUIC as a transport protocol for SMB3.

QUIC, originally created by Google in 2013, combines UDP speed with TLS‑level encryption, addressing TCP’s historic limitations such as slow connection negotiation and packet loss handling.

System administrators can enable QUIC by adding the +quic option in the Samba configuration. Linux servers also need the quic.ko kernel module, which is currently released separately but may be merged into the main kernel later; clients without the module can use the ngtcp2‑based implementation.

Unix SMB3 extensions enabled by default – This ensures full compatibility with Linux and Unix‑like clients, providing native support for POSIX semantics, symbolic links, hard links, extended attributes, and advanced permissions without additional configuration. Windows clients that do not support these extensions continue to operate with standard behavior.

File timestamp handling has been improved to align with newer Windows Server versions (Windows 10, Server 2016), eliminating delayed write‑time updates.

Integration with Prometheus and new monitoring tools – Samba 4.23 adds the smb_prometheus_endpoint utility, which exposes metrics in a Prometheus‑compatible format, facilitating integration with Grafana and other monitoring platforms for clearer visibility into server status and performance.

The samba-tool backup command now includes a --no-secrets option, allowing backups that omit passwords, BitLocker recovery keys, or other sensitive attributes—useful for testing or lab environments.

CTDB, the clustering foundation, now supports loading tunable variables from multiple files under /etc/ctdb/tunables.d/*.tunables, giving administrators greater flexibility when defining custom configurations.

Samba also adds per‑share profiling statistics accessible via the smbstatus tool, helping identify bottlenecks and analyze activity across multiple shared resources.

How to Install or Upgrade Samba on Ubuntu

To install or upgrade to the latest Samba version on Ubuntu and its derivatives, follow these steps:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linux-schools/samba-latest

sudo apt-get update

Then install or update Samba: sudo apt install samba After installation, verify the version with: samba --version For more information, visit the official Samba website.