Samba

networking A free suite of programs which implement the

Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.

Originally developed for Unix by Andrew Tridgell at the

Australian National University, the Samba server allows

files and printers on the host operating system to be

shared with clients such as Windows for Workgroups, DOS,

OS/2, Windows NT and others.

For example, instead of using telnet to log in to a Unix

machine to edit a file there, a Windows 95 user might

connect a drive in the Windows Explorer to a Samba server on

the Unix machine and edit the file in a Windows editor.

A Unix client called smbclient, built from the same sourcecode, allows ftp-like access to SMB resources.

Samba is available for many Unix variants, OS/2, and VMS.

Porting to Novell Netware is in progress (August 1996).

smblib is a portable generic library for making SMB calls

for implementing client/server functions from within any

program. Linux implements a complete file system (based on

smbclient) so by default Linux users have full access to

resources on LAN Server, Windows NT and LAN Manager

networks.

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(1998-11-22)