Open SUSE® 11.0 and SUSE® Linux® Enterprise Server Bible

Chapter 18. Setting Up Windows Interoperability with Samba

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Setting up and using a Samba client

• Setting up a Samba server

• Using Winbind

• Samba command-line utilities

• The Samba configuration file

• Using SWAT, Samba's web configuration tool

Samba (like Apache and Linux itself) is a success story for Free and Open Source software that has its origins in the early 1990s.

Samba takes its name from the letters SMB, which stand for Server Message Block. SMB is a protocol for sharing files, printers, and other resources across a network. The SMB protocol dates back to an IBM document from 1985. SMB working together with Network Basic Input/Output System (NetBIOS) and NetBIOS Extended User Interface (NetBEUI) was adopted by Microsoft as its method of providing shared resources over the network, and became the standard for Microsoft Windows.

Reference documents for SMB were issued by X/Open (now the Open Group), and although SMB is closely associated with Microsoft, it has always been, at least in part, publicly documented.

SMB was renamed Common Internet File System (CIFS) by Microsoft in 1996 and, at the same time, Microsoft issued a draft RFC describing the protocol. However, the draft RFC never became an official standard.

As PCs running DOS and early versions of Windows became common, the need for an SMB server running on Unix or Unix-like systems was commonly felt, and various commercial implementations were made available. Samba originally started life in 1992 as a quick hack by ...