8.1 Getting Started

This part of the book will cover the basics of SMB, enumerate and describe some of the SMB message types (commands), discuss protocol dialects, give some details on authentication, and provide a few examples. That should be enough to help you develop a working knowledge of the protocol, a working SMB client, and possibly a simple server.

Bear in mind, though, that SMB is more complex and less well defined than NBT. In the NBT section it was possible to describe every message type and provide a comprehensive review of the entire NBT protocol. It is not practical to cover all of SMB in the same way. Instead, the goal here is to explain the basics of SMB, provide details that are missing from other sources, and describe how to go about exploring SMB on your own. In other words, the goal is to develop understanding rather than simply providing knowledge.

The textbook for this class is the latest version of the SNIA CIFS Technical Reference . Additional sources are listed in the References section near the end of this book. The most important tool, however, is probably the protocol analyzer. Warm up your copy of Ethereal or NetMon, and get ready to do some packet shoveling.