The purpose of SAMBA

[Christopher_63]

Hi,

Please what's the purpose of installing SAMBA in a linux server ?

Thank's a lot.
Best regars.

[Ross Minkov · Accepted solution]

Samba allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients. Windows users can happily access file and print services without knowing or caring that those services are being offered by a Linux/Unix server.

Read more about Samba here:
http://us4.samba.org/samba/what_is_samba.html

HTH,
Ross

[Andrew Cowan]

Samba is normally installed by default in most distros. The optional component is SWAT which is a browser-based administration tool.
Samba was originally created to enable Windows and Linux interoperability however it has now grown into much more. Samba filesystems are known as CIFS in HP speak.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

CIFS is the extended version of the original SMB (server message blocks) protocol, this is not just hp-speak, but the original name under which microsoft proposed the RFC.

still, maybe noone knew about that and they called it CIFS only as some marketing gibberish :)

Christopher:

Samba is used to offer File/Print/whatever services to windows clients, and it also works vice versa: i.e. for doing processing of large amounts of data with a handy unix script or for pseudo-offline virus scanning You could mount //windowshost/c\$

for some years samba is even able to emulate a whole domain controller, but the value of this is arguable.
I know about one company that switched their DC in NT days to samba on a SUN E6500 because no windows server has able to handle their 40000-user windows domains.

Added bonus of samba3 are *really* *great* options for debugging ADS problems. But be happy if You don't need them :)