Slashdot Mirror
The Official Samba 3 HOWTO and Reference Guide
The book itself For people with little time, the book starts with the chapter "FastStart: Cure for the Impatient," which features many example configurations of working solutions, each illustrating working setups using Samba to different ends -- as a file and print server, CD-ROM server, etc.
In the following chapters, the How-To and Reference Guide deals with all aspects of server and security modes, domain control and backup domain control and stand-alone configurations. Each of the chapters include further example configurations as well as in-depth discussion of the chapter's topic, and a "common errors" section that answers the most obvious real life errors.
In the third part of the book (Advanced Configuration) the reader is presented with detailed information on the topics of network browsing, account information databases, and group mapping from MS Windows to the Unix world, as well as file, directory and share access controls and file and record locking. There is also a second chapter about security in this part of the book.
Still in the third part, the book explains the new features of Samba 3.0.0, for instance interdomain trust relationships and distributed file systems.
Two very thorough chapters explain the conventional printing support with Samba, as well as printing via the newer print system CUPS. Following short chapters about winbind and network management, the Guide explains how to set up and maintain system and account policies, and how to exercise desktop profile management, and provides short but informative chapters about PAM authentication, Windows/Samba network integration, character sets, and some words about backups and high availability.
Part 4 of the Samba How-To Guide deals exclusively with updating and migrating from Samba 2.x to Samba 3.0.0, including an example migration from a NT4 PDC to a Samba-3 PDC and a user guide to the SWAT (graphical interface for configuring Samba) tool.
In part 5 (Troubleshooting) the reader is given a very good checklist to verify all functions of the Samba installation are working correctly and a guide how to analyze and solve problems with Samba.
In the appendices, the book gives information on how to obtain and compile Samba, lists supported platforms, gives hints for performance tuning, dhcp and dns, and includes the man pages to the Samba programs and configuration files.
Primary audience The book is written for people in the "Windows world" who want to take a look into the services and possibilities Samba offers for them. Beginners get very detailed information which things are possible with Samba and which are not (for now), as well as the necessary background for installing and configuring Samba on a Unix/Linux system. For the advanced user, there are still some diamonds of new information and also a good reference for all the new settings and options in the new Samba release. Personal Rating I can recommend this book to everyone interested in Samba - especially the new 3.0 version - no matter if you are new to Samba or even an experienced user of the software who is interested in expanding your knowledge and trying new features. It has its place on my bookshelf of very useful documentation.You can purchase The Official Samba 3 HOWTO and Reference Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Can you get windows 2k running with 30 users on a p2-266?
How about giving people access to a development unix jboss webapps directory, directly from their windows workstations?
Sometimes, it's not whether windows is good or bad.. it's just bloody inconvenient with what you have before you.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
where the acquire, compile, install instructions are in the appendix. So many books on Linux and Linux apps usually waste several of the first few chapters on this. Happily, Linux an Linux app installation has improved to the point that any more than a paragraph or two on compiling and installation is a waste.
I've seen many books where the contents were just copies of man pages, javadocs or online documentation. (a lot of the books reviewed here on /. are anywhere between 25-75% copies of documentation with very little original thought by the authors).
People like to curl up with their book, so they don't mind paying for a printed copy of the online docs. Personally, I'm waiting for paper-thin organic displays to replace paper books before I move back from reading online docs at my computer to reading on my couch or bed.
Samba really is your easiest/fastest/most supported solution, for this case. It works well. We use it in our corporate enviornment. Mostly a Sun shop with NFS mounted home dirs and software shares and such, but there are windows folks out there that want the same home dir. We support many hundreds this way.
The Samba section is pretty minimal to setup, for NFS. If you want printing and domains and such, it
starts to get more complicated.
In order to set up 300 users for MSFT on my network it would have cost my company around $180,000. This is for exchange, the CAL's the microsoft guys to help set it up, and the hardware. Around 30 to 40 thousand of it was licensing costs.
I did it with Samba, plus one extra guy to help, a full migration for about $25,000. Most of that was the extra helps salary. Let's see, that was 7 servers, two black box cabinets, two unmanaged switches, a cisco router, arcserve backup, and an 8 tape dlt 4 changer.
I still have one NT box running old admin software and payroll software, but windows grabs the user info from samba.
So the savings was oh about $140,000 give or take a few thousand for my personal toys that I snuck under the radar.
Is one better then the other, who really knows. I think it really comes down to the core OS. Linux is more solid, the old MSFT boxes used to crash on a daily basis. My linux systems only one has gone down, and that was my email server.
The only real concern isn't what is better, but the users get their data and they do it, without having to know what you are doing behind the scenes or if it is windows or linux, or unix, or POS AS400.
I would be very interested in seeing you write something like the HOWTO Collection. Yes, I'll admit, it was written by experts, but the language presented here is certainly not by any stretch of the imagination "difficult language."
I think your comment about the authors being unable to relate to simple end uers is very unfair. John and Jelmer, and indeed all of the other contributors, do an amazing job relating to end users.
Like a good open source project, this book was composed in such a way that input from _all_ users was greatly appreciated. If you feel that this document is useless, or if there is a section that you feel is hard to understand, by all means, do something about it. Write a new chapter, rewrite a section, add a section, do whatever is necessary. If you send your changes to John or Jelmer, I'm sure they will be merged into the next version of the book, and into the online version.
Granted, I am no stranger to Samba and CIFS itself, but when going through this book, I read it with as much of a new user's perspective as possible, and found that it was very complete and very useful. There was no time in which I felt that a new user should feel overwhelmed by the information presented nor the manner in which this information was presented.
Vance Lankhaar