Chapter 11. Samba

Samba is an application that allows a Linux or UNIX host to act as a file server for Windows systems and Windows systems can access UNIX file systems and printers using their native Windows networking. This chapter demonstrates a Linux system mounting a Windows drive and a Windows system mapping a Linux drive.

This section gives an overview of the setup of Samba and demonstrates a subset of its functionality. This procedure works the same for the IA-32 and Integrity servers used throughout this book; that is, the Samba setup and concepts are the same. I performed the same Samba setup procedure on both the Integrity Advanced Server system and the Red Hat 8.x IA-32 system. The procedure is identical on both platforms. As a sidenote, the "retail" versions of Red Hat, such as 8.x used in this section, has been replaced by Fedora. Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. Fedora Core 2 is available at the time of this writing.

Samba provides its file-sharing functionality using Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. SMB runs on top of TCP/IP. In this section's example, both the Windows system and UNIX system are running TCP/IP and SMB. These provide all the technology that is required to establish file sharing between the two systems.

At the time of this writing, Samba contains the functionalities just mentioned: file-sharing, printer sharing, and advanced user access control of files. There are many advancements taking place with Samba and other software provided under GNU Public License (GPL) as free software. Because the software is free, many individuals have access to it and spend time enhancing the software. For this reason, you may find that additional functionality is included in Samba and other such software.