Playing Nice with Microsoft Windows with Samba

It may not be inevitable anymore, but there just might be one computer, or 100, running Microsoft Windows on your network. Despite vastly different file systems, it is possible, even easy, to enable those Windows machines to access files on the Linux machines. Samba uses the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol to perform this miracle. As far as the Windows PCs are concerned, you even have a C drive.

Samba is a very complex application with excellent documentation. The Samba HOWTO Collection and Reference Guide runs nearly 600 pages. Samba Unleashed is more than double that. The complexity comes from having an impressive amount of options.

Running a default Samba installation is pretty simple, however. It's like a lot of Linux applications. You can tweak Samba endlessly to make it work exactly the way you want, or you can just let it do its thing.

On the positive side, Samba functionality is installed and enable by default with SUSE Linux. In Konqueror, you can change the location to smb://windowshost and see the shared resources available to you there without further intervention necessary. You can easily manage Samba settings through YaST beneath Network Services.

If a bare minimum installation of the operating system was done, and not all of the necessary Samba components were installed on your workstation, you can always start YaST, choose Software, Install and Remove Software, and search for the Samba packages.