Using Samba

Preface

It’s nine in the morning and you’ve just arrived at the computer center after a refreshing night’s sleep. Your pager hasn’t gone off in months. Life is pretty good as a system administrator — and why shouldn’t it be, with the network you’re running? Two hundred identical machines, all running the same operating system. All of the printers are networked, accessible from anywhere in the building, and the auto-configuration scripts that the manufacturer supplied ensure that everyone in the company has a consistent view of the shared disks you’ve set up. Yes, this is the good life. You lean back and take that first delicious sip of morning coffee . . . .

And then, the alarm clock jolts you out of your blissful reverie. If you’re like most system administrators, this could only be a dream. Your morning probably starts with a tireless struggle to get four different computer platforms running three different operating systems simply to talk to each other — that is, if the phone ever stops ringing. Most of your users don’t understand why it’s so hard to access a file on another computer or to send a job to a remote printer. The logs show that the backups are late. For some reason the PCs on the second floor can’t find the tape server. With all these headaches, what’s a network administrator to do?

Easy: take the day off, read this book, and learn Samba!

The Samba Suite

Samba is a suite of tools for sharing resources such as printers and files across a network. This may be a bit of an ...