Chapter 1. Learning the Samba

Samba is an extremely useful networking tool for anyone who has both Windows and Unix systems on his network. Running on a Unix system, it allows Windows to share files and printers on the Unix host, and it also allows Unix users to access resources shared by Windows systems.

Although it might seem natural to use a Windows server to serve files and printers to a network containing Windows clients , there are good reasons for preferring a Samba server for this duty. Samba is reliable software that runs on reliable Unix operating systems, resulting in fewer problems and a low cost of maintenance. Samba also offers better performance under heavy loads, outperforming Windows 2000 Server by a factor of 2 to 1 on identical PC hardware, according to published third-party benchmarks. When common, inexpensive PC hardware fails to meet the demands of a huge client load, the Samba server can easily be moved to a proprietary "big iron" Unix mainframe, which can outperform Windows running on a PC many times. If all that weren't enough, Samba has a very nice cost advantage: it's free. Not only is the software itself freely available, but also no client licenses are required, and it runs on high-quality , free operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.

After reading the previous paragraph, you might come to the conclusion that Samba is commonly used by large organizations with thousands of users on their networks ”and you'd be right! But Samba's user base includes organizations all over the planet, of all types and sizes: from international corporations, to medium and small businesses, to individuals who run Samba on their Linux laptops. In the last case, a tool such as VMware is used to run Windows on the same computer, with Samba enabling the two operating systems to share files.

The types of users vary even more ”Samba is used by corporations, banks and other financial institutions, government and military organizations, schools , public libraries, art galleries, families, and even authors! This book was developed on a Linux system running VMware and Windows 2000, with Adobe FrameMaker running on Windows and the document files served by Samba from the Linux filesystem.

Does all this whet your technological appetite? If so, we encourage you to keep reading, learn about Samba, and follow our examples to set up a Samba server of your own. In this and upcoming chapters, we will tell you exactly how to get started.