February 2003
Intermediate to advanced
560 pages
23h 11m
English
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Chapter 1. Learning the Samba
Samba is an extremely useful networking tool for anyone who has both Windows and Unix systems on his network. Running on a Unix system, it allows Windows to share files and printers on the Unix host, and it also allows Unix users to access resources shared by Windows systems.
Although it might seem natural to use a Windows server to serve files and printers to a network containing Windows clients, there are good reasons for preferring a Samba server for this duty. Samba is reliable software that runs on reliable Unix operating systems, resulting in fewer problems and a low cost of maintenance. Samba also offers better performance under heavy loads, outperforming Windows 2000 Server by a factor of 2 to 1 on identical PC hardware, according to published third-party benchmarks. When common, inexpensive PC hardware fails to meet the demands of a huge client load, the Samba server can easily be moved to a proprietary “big iron” Unix mainframe, which can outperform Windows running on a PC many times. If all that weren’t enough, Samba has a very nice cost advantage: it’s free. Not only is the software itself freely available, but also no client licenses are required, and it runs on high-quality, free operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.
After reading the previous paragraph, you might come to the conclusion that Samba is commonly used by large organizations with thousands of users on their networks—and you’d be right! But Samba’s user base includes organizations ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.