Samba is a technology that interests most of our Linux course students. We have included this piece on Samba as an aid to our students which will be useful knowledge before or after the Linux course.

What is SMB?

SMB, stands for Server Message Block, is a protocol for sharing files, printers, serial ports, and communications abstractions such as named pipes and mail slots between computers.
SMB is an important protocol because of the large number of PCs out there that already have client and server implementations running on them. All Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95 and Windows NT systems are (or are capable of) running SMB as either a client, a server, or both.

What's New
While there are many things out there that are new, perhaps the thing of greatest interest as far as the SMB protocol is concerned is CIFS, the Common Internet File System.

Browsing the network
Having lots of servers out in the network is not much good if users cannot find them. Of course, clients can simply be configured to know about the servers in their environment, but this does not help when new servers are to be introduced or old ones removed.

To solve this problem, browsing has been introduced. Each server broadcasts information about its presence. Clients listen for these broadcasts and build up browse lists. In a NetBEUI environment, this is satisfactory, but in a TCP/IP environment, problems arise. The problems exist because TCP/IP broadcasts are not usually sent outside the subnet in which they originate (although some routers can selectively transport broadcasts to other subnets).
Microsoft have introduced browse servers and the Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) to help overcome these problems.

CIFS: The latest incarnation?
Microsoft and a group of other vendors (Digital Equipment, Data General, SCO, Network Appliance Corp, etc) are engaged in developing a public version of the SMB protocol. It is expected that CIFS 1.0 will be essentially NT LM 0.12 with some modifications for easier use over the Internet.

Roll in SaMBa v3.0 Open Source !
The goal behind the project is one of removing barriers to interoperability.

SAMBA PROVIDES FILE AND PRINT SERVICES FOR MICROSOFT CLIENTS

These services may be hosted off ANY TCP/IP-enabled platform. The original deployment platforms were UNIX and Linux, though today it is in common use across a broad variety of systems.

The Samba project includes :-
• an impressive feature set in file and print serving capabilities
• has been extended to include client functionality
• utilities to ease migration to Samba
• tools to aid interoperability with Microsoft Windows
• administration tools.

Over the past few years many Microsoft network administrators have adopted Samba and have become interested in its deployment.

The mechanics of network browsing have long been the Achilles heel of all Microsoft Windows users. Samba-3 introduces new user and machine account management facilities, a new way to map UNIX groups and Windows groups, Inter-domain trusts, new loadable file system drivers (VFS), and more.

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