Using Samba

Preface

It’s nine in the morning and you’ve just arrived at the computer center after a refreshing night’s sleep. Your pager hasn’t gone off in months. Life is pretty good as a system administrator — and why shouldn’t it be, with the network you’re running? Two hundred identical machines, all running the same operating system. All of the printers are networked, accessible from anywhere in the building, and the auto-configuration scripts that the manufacturer supplied ensure that everyone in the company has a consistent view of the shared disks you’ve set up. Yes, this is the good life. You lean back and take that first delicious sip of morning coffee . . . .

And then, the alarm clock jolts you out of your blissful reverie. If you’re like most system administrators, this could only be a dream. Your morning probably starts with a tireless struggle to get four different computer platforms running three different operating systems simply to talk to each other — that is, if the phone ever stops ringing. Most of your users don’t understand why it’s so hard to access a file on another computer or to send a job to a remote printer. The logs show that the backups are late. For some reason the PCs on the second floor can’t find the tape server. With all these headaches, what’s a network administrator to do?

Easy: take the day off, read this book, and learn Samba!

The Samba Suite

Samba is a suite of tools for sharing resources such as printers and files across a network. This may be a bit of an oversimplification, but Samba is really designed to make your life easier. Samba uses the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is endorsed jointly by Microsoft and IBM, to communicate low-level data between Windows clients and Unix servers on a TCP/IP network.

Four features of Samba make it extremely attractive:

• Samba speaks the same SMB protocol that Microsoft and IBM operating systems have used as their standard since DOS 3.0. This means that almost all Windows machines already understand it and there is no extra client software to install.

• Samba runs on a variety of platforms, including most variants of Unix, OpenVMS, OS/2, AmigaDOS, and NetWare. This means that you can use a single program on the server to provide files and printers to a community of PCs.

• Samba is free. There are several commercial products that duplicate Samba’s features, and some of them are quite expensive. Samba offers you an alternative to packages that could gobble up a significant portion of your IS budget. Samba is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and is considered by its authors to be Open Source software. In other words, you can freely download both the application and the accompanying source code to your computer, and even improve on the original Samba programs if you like.

• Samba administration is centralized on the server. You don’t have to visit every one of your machines, floppy or CD-ROM in hand, to upgrade the client software.

Samba is a complete solution for local area networks (LANs) of all sizes—everything from the two-computer home network to corporate installations with hundreds of nodes. Samba is simple to set up and to administer, and presents itself as a transparent network environment that offers users access to all of the resources they need to get their work done. Once you’ve set it up, Samba will let you:

• Serve Unix files to Windows, OS/2, and other OS clients

• Allow Unix clients to access PC files

• Serve network printers to Windows clients

• Provide name services (broadcast and WINS)

• Allow browsing of network resources from Windows clients

• Create Windows workgroups or domains

• Enforce username and password authentication of clients