After ten years of work and six years after the last major release, the developers of the Samba team have announced the release of Samba 4.0, the latest version of the free software implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Samba 4 introduces long-awaited support for Microsoft’s Active Directory technology by implementing a combination of an LDAP directory server, a Heimdal Kerberos authentication server, a Dynamic DNS service (via its own DNS server or a BIND plugin) and all the needed remote procedure calls to fulfil the function of an Active Directory Domain Controller for all currently supported versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows 8.