What Is Samba?

Samba is a big, complex project. The Samba project is ambitious and exciting. The team behind Samba is a group of some thirty individuals who are spread the world over and come from an interesting range of backgrounds. This team includes scientists, engineers , programmers, business people, and students.

Team members were drawn into active participation through the desire to help deliver an exciting level of transparent interoperability between Microsoft Windows and the non-Microsoft information technology world.

The slogan that unites the efforts behind the Samba project says: Samba, Opening Windows to a Wider World! The goal behind the project is one of removing barriers to interoperability.

Samba provides file and print services for Microsoft Windows clients . These services may be hosted off any TCP/IP-enabled platform. The original deployment platforms were UNIX and Linux, though today it is in common use across a broad variety of systems.

The Samba project includes not only an impressive feature set in file and print serving capabilities, but has been extended to include client functionality, utilities to ease migration to Samba, tools to aid interoperability with Microsoft Windows, and adminstration tools.

The real people behind Samba are users like you. You have inspired the developers (the Samba Team) to do more than any of them imagined could or should be done. User feedback drives Samba development. Samba-3 in particular incorporates a huge amount of work done as a result of user requests , suggestions and direct code contributions.