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This is version 1.9.17 of Samba, the free SMB client and server for unix
and other operating systems. Samba is maintained by the Samba Team,
who support the original author, Andrew Tridgell.
>>>> Please read THE WHOLE of this file as it gives important information
>>>> about the configuration and use of Samba.
This software is freely distributable under the GNU public license, a
copy of which you should have received with this software (in a file
called COPYING).
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. There is no reason why Apple
Macs and indeed any Web browser should not be able to speak this
protocol, and current development (in which the Samba team is heavily
involved) is aimed at exactly that. 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 is what the new SMB initiative is
called. For details watch http://samba.anu.edu.au/cifs.
WHAT CAN SAMBA DO?
==================
Here is a very short list of what samba includes, and what it does.
- 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 among 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
For a much better overview have a look at the web site at
http://samba.canberra.edu.au/pub/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.anu.edu.au/pub/samba/smblib.
CONTRIBUTIONS
=============
If you want to contribute to the development of the software then
please join the mailing list. The Samba team accepts patches
(preferably in "diff -u" format, see docs/BUGS.txt for more details)
and are always glad to receive feedback or suggestions to the address
samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au.
You could also send hardware/software/money/jewelry or pizza
vouchers directly to Andrew. The pizza vouchers would be especially
welcome, in fact there is a special field in the survey for people who
have paid up their pizza :-)
If you like a particular feature then look through the change-log and
see who added it, then send them an email.
Remember that free software of this kind lives or dies by the response
we get. If noone tells us they like it then we'll probably move onto
something else. However, as you can see from the user survey quite a lot of
people do seem to like it at the moment :-)
Andrew Tridgell
Email: samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au
3 Ballow Crescent
Macgregor, A.C.T.
2615 Australia
Samba Team
Email: samba-bugs@samba.anu.edu.au
MORE INFO
=========
DOCUMENTATION
-------------
There is quite a bit of documentation included with the package,
including man pages, and lots of .txt files with hints and useful
info. This is also available from the web page.
FTP SITE
--------
The main anonymous ftp distribution site for this software is
samba.anu.edu.au in the directory pub/samba/.
MAILING LIST
------------
There is a mailing list for discussion of Samba. To subscribe send
mail to listproc@samba.anu.edu.au with a body of "subscribe samba Your Name"
To send mail to everyone on the list mail to samba@listproc.anu.edu.au
There is also an announcement mailing list where new versions are
announced. To subscribe send mail to listproc@samba.anu.edu.au with a
body of "subscribe samba-announce Your Name". All announcements also
go to the samba list.
NEWS GROUP
----------
You might also like to look at the usenet news group
comp.protocols.smb as it often contains lots of useful info and is
frequented by lots of Samba users. The newsgroup was initially setup
by people on the Samba mailing list. It is not, however, exclusive to
Samba, it is a forum for discussing the SMB protocol (which Samba
implements). The samba list is gatewayed to this newsgroup.
WEB SITE
--------
A Samba WWW site has been setup with lots of useful info. Connect to:
http://samba.canberra.edu.au/pub/samba/
As well as general information and documentation, this also has searchable
archives of the mailing list and a user survey that shows who else is using
this package. Have you registered with the survey yet? :-)
It is maintained by Paul Blackman (thanks Paul!). You can contact him
at ictinus@lake.canberra.edu.au.
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