Chapter 2. Installing Samba on a Unix System

It would be unwise to purchase a car or a house on appearance alone or from a description in a brochure. It is similarly unwise to talk about a piece of software without hands-on experience. Systems administration is a hands-on job. In this chapter, we are dedicated to helping you test drive your own server so that you can see for yourself how Samba behaves. Because open source projects (and software packages in general) evolve over time, the remainder of this book is based on the current production Samba release at the time of writing, version 3.0.22. We start with the necessary steps to install Samba both from the source release available on the official Samba web site and from vendor or community packages. By the end of the chapter, you will have a working server with a simple disk share.