This is a book about Samba. It is a tool, a derived work of the labors of many and of the diligence and goodwill of more than a few. This book contains material that has been
contributed in a persistent belief that each of us can add value to our neighbors as well as to those who will follow us.

This book is designed to meet the needs of the Microsoft network administrator. UNIX administrators will benefit from this book also, though they may complain that it is hard to

Here is a quick description of each chapter:

Chapter 1 introduces Samba and its capabilities, then describes the most important concepts of NetBIOS and SMB/CIFS networking. Finally, we give you a quick overview of the daemons and utilities that are included in the Samba distribution.

Chapter 2 covers configuring, compiling, installing, setting up, and testing the Samba server on a Unix platform.

Chapter 3 explains how to configure Microsoft Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT/2000/XP clients to participate in an SMB network.

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.