Table of Contents

Chapter 1. An to Samba Samba has been the subject of many cute descriptions in the past, some of which might have included a dancing penguin carrying a Microsoft Windows logo. We have been guilty of these things ourselves at...

Chapter 2. Installing Samba on a Unix System It would be unwise to purchase a car or a house on appearance alone or from a description in a brochure. It is similarly unwise to talk about a piece of software without hands-on e...

Chapter 3. Configuring Windows Clients Samba's main philosophy is that it is better to teach the server to speak the client's language than the other way around. Past experiences with client software such as PC-NFS have led m...

Chapter 4. The Samba Configuration File In the beginning, Samba servers were managed solely by a text configuration file named smb.conf. Today settings are mixed between the smb.conf file and local database files in /usr/loca...

Chapter 5. Accounts, Authentication, and Authorization Authentication is proving that you are who you say you are. You do this every day, during such activities as printing a document or saving a file to a network drive. When...

Chapter 6. Advanced Disk Shares So far, the configurations we've discussed have been rudimentary and useful primarily for testing an initial server installation. In this chapter, you will see exactly why so many network admin...

Chapter 7. Printing File serving is considered by most to be Samba's bread and butter. However, pulling up a close second in justifications for deploying Samba is its capability to centrally manage printers and to make them a...

Chapter 8. Name Resolution and Network Browsing Name resolution is critical to Samba's operation, because names are used to find the servers that share files or printers. Network browsing takes the task of finding servers...

Chapter 9. Domain Controllers Our discussion of Samba up to this point has focused on file and print servers that authenticate users against a local set of accounts; these accounts had to previously be added to the system hos...

Chapter 10. Domain Member Servers Windows domains are based on centralized authentication services provided by domain controllers. A moderately sized domain has a limited number of DCs, but can possibly host hundreds of file...

Chapter 11. Unix Clients Samba's fame and popularity come from its ability to serve pervasive Microsoft Windows clients, but SMB/CIFS clients are also available on a wide variety of platforms and operating systems from...

Chapter 12. Troubleshooting Samba Samba is extremely robust. Once you have everything set up the way you want it, you'll probably forget that it is running. When trouble occurs, it's typically during installation or when you'...