WHAT IS SMB?
The very short answer is that it is the protocol by which a
lot of PC-related machines share files and printers and
other informatiuon such as lists of available files and
printers. Operating systems that support this natively
include Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux and add on packages that
achieve the same thing are available for DOS, Windows, VMS,
Unix of all kinds, MVS, and more. Apple Macs and some Web
Browsers can speak this protocol as well. Alternatives to
SMB include Netware, NFS, Appletalk, Banyan Vines, Decnet
etc; many of these have advantages but none are both public
specifications and widely implemented in desktop machines by
default.
The Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS) is what the new SMB
initiative is called. For details watch
http://samba.org/cifs.
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO USE SMB?
-
Many people want to integrate their Microsoft or IBM style
desktop machines with their Unix or VMS (etc) servers.
-
Others want to integrate their Microsoft (etc) servers
with Unix or VMS (etc) servers. This is a different
problem to integrating desktop clients.
-
Others want to replace protocols like NFS, DecNet and
Novell NCP, especially when used with PCs.
WHAT CAN SAMBA DO?
Here is a very short list of what samba includes, and what
it does. For many networks this can be simply summarised by
"Samba provides a complete replacement for Windows NT, Warp,
NFS or Netware servers."
-
a SMB server, to provide Windows NT and LAN Manager-style
file and print services to SMB clients such as Windows 95,
Warp Server, smbfs and others.
-
a NetBIOS (rfc1001/1002) nameserver, which amongst other
things gives browsing support. Samba can be the master
browser on your LAN if you wish.
-
a ftp-like SMB client so you can access PC resources
(disks and printers) from 1, Netware and other operating
systems
- a tar extension to the client for backing up PCs
-
limited command-line tool that supports some of the NT
administrative functionality, which can be used on Samba,
NT workstation and NT server.
For a much better overview have a look at the web site at
http://samba.org/samba,
and browse the user survey.
Related packages include:
-
smbfs, a linux-only filesystem allowing you to mount
remote SMB filesystems from PCs on your linux box. This is
included as standard with Linux 2.0 and later.
-
tcpdump-smb, a extension to tcpdump to allow you to
investigate SMB networking problems over netbeui and
tcp/ip.
-
smblib, a library of smb functions which are designed to
make it easy to smb-ise any particular application. See
ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/smblib.
CONTRIBUTIONS
If you want to contribute to the development of the software
then please join the mailing list. The Samba team accepts
patches (preferably in "diff -u" format, see docs/BUGS.txt
for more details) and are always glad to receive feedback or
suggestions to the address samba-bugs@samba.org. We have
recently put a new bug tracking system into place which
should help the throughput quite a lot. You can also get the
Samba sourcecode straight from the CVS tree - see
http://samba.org/cvs.html.
You could also send hardware/software/money/jewelry or pizza
vouchers directly to Andrew. The pizza vouchers would be
especially welcome, in fact there is a special field in the
survey for people who have paid up their pizza :-)
If you like a particular feature then look through the CVS
change-log (on the web at
http://samba.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/samba
) and see who added it, then send them an email.
Remember that free software of this kind lives or dies by
the response we get. If noone tells us they like it then we
will probably move onto something else. However, as you can
see from the user survey quite a lot of people do seem to
like it at the moment :-)
Andrew Tridgell
Email: samba-bugs@samba.org
3 Ballow Crescent
Macgregor, A.C.T.
2615 Australia
Samba Team
Email: samba-bugs@samba.org
DOCUMENTATION
There is quite a bit of documentation included with the
package, including man pages, and lots of .txt files with
hints and useful info. This is also available from the web
page. There is a growing collection of information under
docs/faq; by the next release expect this to be the default
starting point.
A list of Samba documentation in languages other than
English is available on the web page.
If you would like to help with the documentation (and we
_need_ help!) then have a look at the mailing list
samba-docs, archived at
http://lists.samba.org/
MAILING LIST
There is a mailing list for discussion of Samba. To
subscribe send mail to listproc@samba.org with a body of
"subscribe samba Your Name" Please do NOT send this request
to the list alias instead.
To send mail to everyone on the list mail to
samba@listproc.anu.edu.au
There is also an announcement mailing list where new
versions are announced. To subscribe send mail to
listproc@samba.org with a body of "subscribe samba-announce
Your Name". All announcements also go to the samba list.
For details of other Samba mailing lists and for access to
archives, see
http://lists.samba.org/
NEWS GROUP
You might also like to look at the usenet news group
comp.protocols.smb as it often contains lots of useful info
and is frequented by lots of Samba users. The newsgroup was
initially setup by people on the Samba mailing list. It is
not, however, exclusive to Samba, it is a forum for
discussing the SMB protocol (which Samba implements). The
samba list is gatewayed to this newsgroup.
WEB SITE
A Samba WWW site has been setup with lots of useful info.
Connect to:
http://samba.org/samba/
As well as general information and documentation, this also
has searchable archives of the mailing list and a user
survey that shows who else is using this package. Have you
registered with the survey yet? :-)
|
ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/uw7/net/samba/
ftp://ftp2.sco.com/pub/skunkware/osr5/net/samba/
