The Samba software suite is a collection of programs that implements the Server Message Block (commonly abbreviated as SMB) protocol for UNIX systems. This protocol is sometimes also referred to as the Common Internet File System (CIFS), LanManager or NetBIOS protocol.
The smbd daemon provides the file and print services to SMB clients, such as Windows 95/98, Windows NT, Windows for Workgroups or LanManager. The configuration file for this daemon is described in smb.conf
The nmbd daemon provides NetBIOS nameserving and browsing support. The configuration file for this daemon is described in smb.conf
The smbclient program implements a simple ftp-like client. This is useful for accessing SMB shares on other compatible servers (such as Windows NT), and can also be used to allow a UNIX box to print to a printer attached to any SMB server (such as a PC running Windows NT).
The testparm utility is a simple syntax checker for Samba's smb.confconfiguration file.
The testprns utility supports testing printer names defined in your printcap> file used by Samba.
The smbstatus tool provides access to information about the current connections to smbd.
The nmblookup tools allows NetBIOS name queries to be made from a UNIX host.
The make_smbcodepage utility provides a means of creating SMB code page definition files for your smbd server.
The smbpasswd command is a tool for changing LanMan and Windows NT password hashes on Samba and Windows NT servers.
The Samba suite is made up of several components. Each component is described in a separate manual page. It is strongly recommended that you read the documentation that comes with Samba and the manual pages of those components that you use. If the manual pages aren't clear enough then please send a patch or bug report to samba@samba.org
The Samba software suite is licensed under the GNU Public License(GPL). A copy of that license should have come with the package in the file COPYING. You are encouraged to distribute copies of the Samba suite, but please obey the terms of this license.
The latest version of the Samba suite can be obtained via anonymous ftp from samba.org in the directory pub/samba/. It is also available on several mirror sites worldwide.
You may also find useful information about Samba on the newsgroup comp.protocol.smb and the Samba mailing list. Details on how to join the mailing list are given in the README file that comes with Samba.
If you have access to a WWW viewer (such as Netscape or Mosaic) then you will also find lots of useful information, including back issues of the Samba mailing list, at http://lists.samba.org.
If you wish to contribute to the Samba project, then I suggest you join the Samba mailing list at http://lists.samba.org.
If you have patches to submit or bugs to report then you may mail them directly to samba-patches@samba.org. Note, however, that due to the enormous popularity of this package the Samba Team may take some time to respond to mail. We prefer patches in diff -u format.
Contributors to the project are now too numerous to mention here but all deserve the thanks of all Samba users. To see a full list, look at ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/alpha/change-log for the pre-CVS changes and at ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/alpha/cvs.log for the contributors to Samba post-CVS. CVS is the Open Source source code control system used by the Samba Team to develop Samba. The project would have been unmanageable without it.
In addition, several commercial organizations now help fund the Samba Team with money and equipment. For details see the Samba Web pages at http://samba.org/samba/samba-thanks.html.
The original Samba software and related utilities were created by Andrew Tridgell. Samba is now developed by the Samba Team as an Open Source project similar to the way the Linux kernel is developed.
The original Samba man pages were written by Karl Auer. The man page sources were converted to YODL format (another excellent piece of Open Source software, available at ftp://ftp.icce.rug.nl/pub/unix/) and updated for the Samba 2.0 release by Jeremy Allison. The conversion to DocBook for Samba 2.2 was done by Gerald Carter