Samba 4.25 Released With High-Availability and Clustering Features

The Samba team released stable Samba 4.25. Its headline feature is experimental SMB3 Persistent Handles for high-availability setups, plus the vfs_ceph_rgw module exposing Ceph Object Gateway buckets as SMB shares and several clustered deployment improvements.

• Experimental SMB3 Persistent Handles keep open files accessible after a server restart
• vfs_ceph_rgw module exposes Ceph Object Gateway buckets as SMB shares
• New cluster functional level makes rolling cluster upgrades safer
• Kerberos now defaults to AES encryption in domains at functional level 2008 or newer (CVE-2026-20833)