Samba 4.5 has been released and it is the latest, newest stable branch of the free widely-used, cross-platform, and open-source software project that re-implements the SMB/CIFS networking protocol on UNIX-like platforms.
Samba is being used by default in numerous, if not all GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as on Apple’s macOS, to allow users to access network shares from other computers that run Microsoft Windows and to interact with them to exchange any file format that exists today.
As expected, Samba 4.5 is a massive release, which not only resolves many of the issues from previous versions but also introduces a bunch of new features and enhancements to make this open source software even more reliable and secure. As such, to improve security, Samba 4.5 comes with NTLMv1 authentication disabled by default.