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Hour 1
Introduction to Samba

This hour gives you an overview of what Samba is and what it does. In the past, I have received email messages from all types of people asking questions such as, "Can Samba authenticate http connections to a Windows NT Server against the NIS+ password database on a Solaris 2.6 machine?" and "Has Samba been ported to Windows NT?" This hour is designed to answer some of the questions that you might have about Samba, its capabilities, and its availability.

What Is Samba?

Samba is an Open Source Software (OSS) project first developed by Andrew Tridgell in 1991 at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. During that time, Andrew was a Ph.D. student in the computer science laboratory and was using PC-NFS to connect to files on Sun workstations. On the arrival of a beta copy of eXcursion from Digital, he began testing the client. To some disappointment, however, the servers to which the eXcursion client could connect were available only on VMS and Ultrix. Being curious, as most computer science graduate students are, Andrew began to think about implementing the file sharing protocol on nondigital workstations.

At the time, he had never heard of NetBIOS or SMB. In fact, this was his first venture into network socket programming. A short time later, Andrew had a somewhat working connection to the Sun using the eXcursion client. The initial implementation of his server had a lot of hard-coded "magic" values in it that simply replicated responses that the Ultrix server would make. After speaking to a person at Digital, Andrew was first introduced to the NetBIOS protocol. It was not until two years after his first implementation that he saw specifications for the SMB protocol and learned what all the "magic" values represented.

Andrew released his first implementation in January 1992. During the next two years, he mostly used an X terminal and had no need to further develop the pet project he began. During this time, Andrew was also introduced to Linux. When interest in his SMB server began to grow, development of Samba resumed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

One commonly asked question is "What does Samba mean?" The answer is fairly simple, to be honest. Andrew's original software was named SMBserver. Due to legal issues, the name had to be changed. One of the words that Andrew found after grepping through /usr/dict/words for s, m, and b was samba, and there you have it!

Samba is available for download from the primary distribution site in Australia. You can download and compile the source code for the suite, or you may download precompiled binaries for certain platforms. You should choose one of the several mirror sites around the world closest to you. You can find the complete list of mirror sites at the main Samba Web page located at the http://samba.org.

A simple description of Samba is a suite of programs that enables you to access files and printers on a non-Windows server using the Windows' client native support for accessing remote resources.

More specifically, Samba is a free implementation of an SMB (Server Message Block protocol) server primarily developed for UNIX-based machines. However, Samba has also been ported to other platforms. Many PC clients use the SMB protocol, recently renamed to CIFS (Common Internet File System), to access remote file systems and printers. These are referred to as shares or services in Windowspeak. For many sites, this is enough to sell the idea of Samba and might be all they ever use it for. However, some other capabilities of Samba add icing on the cake, so to speak. Here's a list of some of the things that Samba can do:

• Act as a NetBIOS name server (refer to Hour 18, "Resolving NetBIOS Names Without Using Broadcasts").



• Fully participate in NetBIOS browsing and browse master elections (refer to Hours 19, "Local Subnet Browsing," and 20, "Routed Networks and Browsing").



• Contains two SMB clients that allow UNIX boxes to access shares or printers on other SMB servers, PCs, or other Samba servers (covered in Hour 13, "UNIX (SMB client, SMBFs, SMB wrapper, and Various Utilities)").



• Contains extensions that allow UNIX machines to back up files on remote SMB shares, such as Windows file servers. (see Hour 23, "Tips and Tricks").



• Provides a command line utility for limited remote administrative functionality for Windows NT servers and Samba servers (refer to Hour 22, "Experimental PDC Support").



• Can act as a Domain Controller for Windows 9x and Windows for Workgroups clients. Development is underway to provide Domain Control for Windows NT 3.51/4.0 clients and has been partially implemented (see Hours 21, "Windows 9x Domain Control," and 22).

A Samba server can fit into existing networks in many ways. Here are some common examples:

• Replaces a Windows NT File/Print server for licensing cost reasons (refer to Hour 12, "Case Study: Replacing an NT File and Print Server").



• Provides a gateway for synchronizing UNIX and Windows NT passwords (covered in Hour 16, "Password Synchronization").



• Acts as a "home directory" server so that UNIX home directories and Windows home directories exist in a common space (see Hour 6, "Security Levels and Passwords").



• Act as a print gateway between PCs and UNIX networked printers (see Hour 7, "File Sharing").



• Allows UNIX machines access to NT files.

These are only a few examples. Only your own imagination and your ability as a programmer limit you.

Sams Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours		ContentsIndex
Hour 1: Introduction to Samba		Previous HourNext Hour
Sections in this Chapter: What Is Samba? The GNU General Public License (GPL) Traditional Solutions Summary What Platforms Does It Run On? Q&A		Previous SectionNext Section

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