Setting Up SAMBA | EBooks | Ebooks authored by Sharanam Shah

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Setting Up SAMBA

Samba is the brainchild of Andrew Tridgell who currently heads the Samba development team from his home of Canberra, Australia. The project was born in 1991 when Andrew created a fileserver program for his local network that supported an odd DEC protocol from Digital Pathworks. Although he didn't know it at the time, that protocol later turned out to be SMB. A few years later, he expanded upon his custom-made SMB server and began distributing it as a product on the Internet under the name SMB Server. However, Andrew could not keep that name it already belonged to another company's product so he tried the following Unix renaming approach:

grep -i 's.*m.*b' /usr/dict/words

And the response was:

salmonberry samba sawtimber scramble

Thus, the name Samba was born.

Those above-average sys admins have traditionally sneaked Linux into company networks with a file and print server. The software behind this, that allows Linux and most other Unix variants participate seamlessly and even outperform Windows-based machines on small networks, is called Samba.

Samba (from the Server Message Block protocol or SMB) is a suite of programs that implement the SMB protocol on Linux. The SMB protocol is the foundation of Windows networking, or as Microsoft now calls it, the Common Internet File System (CIFS).

Today, the Samba suite revolves around a pair of Unix daemons that provide shared resources, called shares, to SMB clients on a network. (Shares are sometimes called services as well.) These daemons are:

smbd: A daemon that allows file and printer sharing on an SMB network and provides authentication and authorization for SMB clients

nmbd: A daemon that looks after the Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) and assists with browsing

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