| marcj |
www.samba.org/about.html :
WHAT IS SMB?
============
This is a big question.
The very short answer is that it is the protocol by which a lot of
PC-related machines share files and printers and other informatiuon
such as lists of available files and printers. Operating systems that
support this natively include Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux and add on
packages that achieve the same thing are available for DOS, Windows,
VMS, Unix of all kinds, MVS, and more. Apple Macs and some Web Browsers
can speak this protocol as well. Alternatives to SMB include
Netware, NFS, Appletalk, Banyan Vines, Decnet etc; many of these have
advantages but none are both public specifications and widely
implemented in desktop machines by default.
The Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS) is what the new SMB initiative
is called. For details watch http://samba.org/cifs.
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO USE SMB?
==============================
1. Many people want to integrate their Microsoft or IBM style desktop
machines with their Unix or VMS (etc) servers.
2. Others want to integrate their Microsoft (etc) servers with Unix
or VMS (etc) servers. This is a different problem to integrating
desktop clients.
3. Others want to replace protocols like NFS, DecNet and Novell NCP,
especially when used with PCs.
WHAT CAN SAMBA DO?
==================
Here is a very short list of what samba includes, and what it does. For
many networks this can be simply summarised by "Samba provides a complete
replacement for Windows NT, Warp, NFS or Netware servers."
- a SMB server, to provide Windows NT and LAN Manager-style file and print
services to SMB clients such as Windows 95, Warp Server, smbfs and others.
- a NetBIOS (rfc1001/1002) nameserver, which amongst other things gives
browsing support. Samba can be the master browser on your LAN if you wish.
- a ftp-like SMB client so you can access PC resources (disks and
printers) from unix, Netware and other operating systems
- a tar extension to the client for backing up PCs
- limited command-line tool that supports some of the NT administrative
functionality, which can be used on Samba, NT workstation and NT server.
For a much better overview have a look at the web site at
http://samba.org/samba, and browse the user survey.
Related packages include:
- smbfs, a linux-only filesystem allowing you to mount remote SMB
filesystems from PCs on your linux box. This is included as standard with
Linux 2.0 and later.
- tcpdump-smb, a extension to tcpdump to allow you to investigate SMB
networking problems over netbeui and tcp/ip.
- smblib, a library of smb functions which are designed to make it
easy to smb-ise any particular application. See
ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/smblib. |
