Dancing The Samba (part 1) - Speaking In Tongues (
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Let's start with the million-dollar question - what
is Samba?
Pop open the dictionary, and here's what you'll
see:
samba: 1. large west African tree; 2. a lively ballroom dance from
Brazil
The Samba Web site's definition is more prosaic, and also far
more relevant to the task at hand: "Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite
that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients" (
http://www.samba.org/)
Still confused?
Let me translate. Very simply, Samba is a piece of software that sits on a Linux
server and makes directories on it visible to, and usable by, Windows clients on
the same network. By providing a central, easily-accessible location for file
storage and organization, it allows users on a network to easily share files and
documents with each other using standard Windows file manipulation commands and
controls. As the Samba Web site succinctly puts it, "Samba runs on Unix
platforms, but speaks to Windows clients like a native." (
http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/SambaIntro.html)
As
if that wasn't enough, Samba also supports a bunch of other cool features -
user- and group-level security, name resolution, disk quotas, domain logons,
roving profiles, service browsing - and can emulate (and sometimes surpass) the
functionality of most commercial file servers. Best of all, Samba is free, a
product of the open-source effort, and has gained immense popularity all over
the world both for its feature set and its support for new
technologies.
Samba works on the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol,
which is designed to allow sharing of files, printers and ports between
computers on a network. SMB ships standard with most recent versions of Windows,
and is primarily responsible for allowing Windows systems to "see" and "talk" to
each other on a network. With Samba, *NIX servers can speak SMB too - this
allows them to communicate seamlessly with Windows clients and replicate the
full functionality of a Windows SMB server.
A detailed discussion of how
SMB works is beyond the scope of this tutorial - if you really want to know,
drop by the official Samba Web site and take a look at their technical
documents. If, on the other hand, you're more interested in seeing it in action,
flip the page and let's get compiling!
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