Chapter 35. Setting Up a Samba Server
IN THIS CHAPTER
Installing a Samba server
Sharing directories with Windows systems
Sharing printers with Windows systems
Like it or not, Microsoft Windows systems are everywhere. This chapter discusses the various ways in which software available on Linux systems makes it easy to integrate Linux and Windows filesystems in both directions, and provides features such as automatic printer sharing as freebies along the way.
You'd have to have been living in a cave for the last five or so years not to have heard of Samba, arguably one of the most popular applications ever written for Linux and UNIX-like systems. In a nutshell, Samba is a set of applications that was originally developed to provide support for Microsoft's networking protocols on Linux systems, but which has been ported to just about every other network-aware operating system.
A huge number of books are available that are dedicated to discussing Samba, explaining every nuance of its configuration files, installation, and use. My goal in this chapter is not to embed another one inside a book on Ubuntu, but rather to provide some interesting background information about Windows networking and Samba, and then to explain how to use Samba to share directories and printers on your Ubuntu system so that Microsoft Windows users in your home, academic, or business computing environment can access them.
Overview of Microsoft Windows File Sharing
Networking and related technologies such as routing are ...
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