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People often complain to me that Samba can be hard to administer. I usually end up agreeing with them, but they often fail to grasp why Samba can be hard to administer. Samba is complicated to administer because it does complicated things. It makes a UNIX machine appear to be a Windows file and print server. It does such a good job that many Windows users don't even know the server they are saving their files on or printing their files to is running UNIX. To achieve this magic, Samba has to be the glue that holds these two very different systems together. It has to do that without breaking the assumptions that Windows clients make about their servers or breaking the robustness and security inherent in a UNIX system.

To master Samba, it helps to have guides who fundamentally understand the differences between Windows and UNIX and the ways in which Samba can bridge that gulf. Gerald Carter and Richard Sharpe are such guides. We made Gerald a member of the Samba Team after he took on and documented the early experimental code that was being written to support the Windows NT Domain protocols. Gerald is the author of the Samba NT-Domain Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ, for short) document and, even though the code is robust now, he still maintains it. Everyone who has worked with the Samba 2.0 code has seen Gerald patiently answering question after question on the Samba mailing lists, helping others gain the knowledge needed to make their systems work exactly the way they want.

Richard joined the Samba Team in 1995 and wrote the original What Is SMB? document that was for many people the first clear explanation of how Microsoft Networking actually works. He is the primary maintainer of the smbtar backup component of Samba and the maintainer of the SMBlib client library routines. Richard is a well-known presence on the Samba mailing lists, helping users with the deepest and darkest corners of Samba configuration and use.

I am very pleased to have been asked to write the foreword for Gerald and Richard's Samba book, Sams Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours. They truly are Samba experts in every sense. I might write lots of the code in Samba, but Gerald and Richard teach people to use that code, and for that I'd like to say a big thank you to them. Even though the Samba code itself is complicated, the book they have written enables you to set up Samba to bridge the Windows and UNIX worlds and make it look easy. For that, you have only Gerald and Richard to thank.

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