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Review:Samba: Integrated UNIX and Windows
Well, after a long wait and fanfare, Kurt has sent a review of John Blair's Samba effort Samba: Integrating UNIX and Windows. If you need to make those two play well together, click below for more information.
Samba: Integrated UNIX and Windows
author
John D. Blair
pages
publisher
Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc.
rating
7
reviewer
Kurt DeMaagd
ISBN
summary
This book provides in depth detail about installing and configuring Samba.
The Scenario
John Blair, a member of the Samba development team, tackles the issue of
integrating Windows and UNIX machines using Samba. While Samba is best known for allowing a UNIX host to act as
a file server for Windows machines, it also includes services for print serving, authentication, name resolution,
and other services needed for Windows networks. Blair begins with a discussion of NetBIOS and SMB, the core protocols
of Windows networking, but spends a majority of the book going into excrutiating detail about how to install and
configure Samba. In addition to general configuration settings, it discusses the necessary configuration settings
for approximately 35 different operating systems, including Linux, OS/2, Solaris, many more obscure operating systems.
As the preface notes, this is a book primarily for UNIX systems administrators. Since it devotes a large amount of space to configuration parameters and explanation, it is definitely not a book to sit down and read on a lazy Sunday afternoon. If you are an administrator attempting to set up Samba, this is the book for you. If you are looking for a more casual reading experience, you will be quickly bogged down in the configuration details.
What's Bad? This is an extremely dry book that is about as fascinating to read as a man page. Many portions of the book are little more than a paper versions of existing documentation. For everyone who doesn't like to pay for information that is already freely distributed, all of the contents are accessable in the Samba man pages or online at Samba's web site.
What's Good? The chapter detailing the SMB and NetBIOS protocols is an interesting and valuable addition to the book. In a text that devotes a majority of its space to installation and configuration, it provides an interesting insight into the underlying workings of the server. For those who are installing Samba, it provides step-by-step installation and configuration information for a variety of operating systems.
So What's In It For Me? If you need to configure a Samba server, this book is a valuable resource. It provides in depth configuration details and examples for a variety of scenarios.
Buy this book at Amazon.
Table of Contents- Introduction
- Windows Networking Protocols
- Downloading and Building Samba
- Components of the Samba Suite
- Global Configuration Options
- Service Configuration Options
- Browser Configuration Options
- Access Control Configuration Examples
- Service Configuration Examples
- Other Tricks and Techniques
- Diagnosing Problems
- The Linux SMB Filesystem
By and large, the book, as discussed is good on detail and authoritative. But there's one big weakness. It fails to go into any depth on encrypted Windows password authentication. Newcomers can easily bash their brains out for hours wondering why they can't get login permission. Blair's solution is to go for plain-text authentication - very weak. It's covered in the more recent HOWTO's, but not in this book.
methinks you have it backwards. If I remember correctly (brain clanking as it attempts to access data that is almost 10 years old) NetBIOS is just a protocol for basic peer-to-peer network communication between named computers on a network.
Windows uses NetBIOS to send Server Message Blocks (SMBs). Seems to me that Win95/98/NT now does SMB via TCP, and NetBIOS isn't all that useful anymore (except for backward compatibility with 3.11, etc).
Actually, the more I think about it, I seem to remember that NetBIOS was more or less obsoleted by NetBEUI a while back (although I may be confusing things on this point).
Unfortunately this got a little bit delayed... Using samba is scheduled to arrive only by September... 8-(
By and large, the book, as discussed is good on detail and authoritative. But there's one big weakness. I fails to go into any depth on encrypted Windows password authentication. Newcomers can easily bash their brains out for hours wondering why they can't get login permission. Blair's solution is to go for plain-text authentication - very weak. It's covered in the more recent HOWTO's, but not in this book.
Bear in mind that the book is from the summer of 1998 and covers Samba 1.9. Notable changes in 2.0 include the use of of autoconf, better NT domain functionality and the new SWAT Web configuration tool. (And I am unsure of this, but the libdes compilation section might be obsolete now too).
As others have mentioned, the sections on Windows networking alone make the book worthwhile. In addition, I found the section on setting up Samba to use encrypted passwords highly useful. There is also a large section on all of the Samba configuration options.
While much of the book's information is located in the Samba source tree, the information is spread out among dozens of files. Consider the price of this book a small investment to avoid hefty NT client fees.
Posted by Jeremy Allison - Samba Team:
:-).
:-). So it's actually a dead product (old, crufty SVR3 code, with a user level thread library) ported to Solaris.
:-) :-).
> SUN Microsystems bought out a company that was
> privy to NT's source code (trust me, MS doesn't
> want anyone to know about this). In taking
> classes for SUN, I ran across an instructor who
> told the class to learn SAMBA, but not to dwell
> on it because SUN was working on a TRUE SMB
> client for UNIX.
Oh, you mean Project *Cascade* (now released as Sun's PC/Netlink services. I'm afraid your 'secret knowledge' is a bit out of date (oh, *do* pay attention, 007...
It's a port of AT&T's Advanced Services for UNIX. Yes, that old chestnut (the one that AT&T sued MS over lack of access to source code, and settled for a bunch of cash and *no* source code
Oh yes. And it's *slooow****. Note that in the latest PC Week benchmark that Sun was involved in they chose to use Samba, rather than any of the products they actually *sell*. Hmmmmm. Doesn't inspire confidence does it......
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
I'd assume that it will be for Solaris 2.x SPARC first, then ported to x86 and possibly open sourced, although I wouldn't open my breath. For those of us in the situation where we need to talk to both worlds, this is a godsend.
SAMBA's done a great job and is one of the best tools ever created for interoperablility, but with SUN's new tool, at least Solaris users will have a commercially supported product to do what we need to do.
As always, redirect all flames to /dev/null.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Hell, I used to go to school with the author -- he and I got our first UNIX-related jobs running a NeXTStep cluster. Got my autographed copy of his book right here in my lap. He's a great guy, it's a great book, and it's totally worth it.
--adr
hope this helps.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
You can use smbclient, which works similarly to a command-line FTP client. Under Linux you can use smbfs to mount SMB shares onto your file-system.
according to my copy of the oreilly catalogue (data march 1999), a new book, "using samba" by kelly, donham, & collier-brown, will be released in june 1999. the pre-review also mentions suff about "advanced topics in security and complex environments" (passwords encryption perhaps?). comes with a CD. the book also covers the v2.0 gui.
My only disappointment with this book was the author's decision to not discuss the (beta) PDC functionality in Samba. I can understand his reluctance to document features that aren't entirely supported in the current release,, but I would have appreciated at least a theoretical discussion of the issues involved.
I believe that the next non-bug-fix version is going to support using Samba as a PDC without requiring a recompile. That's cool.
On a more general, related note: even though online docs are updated more regularly, and are free (qua beer), they are still inferior to ink on paper in a well-bound book in so many ways that I see no real replacement for the latter. The human eye was not really designed to absorb back-lit information - the real world uses reflected light. The resolution of the printed page is still much higher. The portability and flexibility of a book is still unmatched, and the multiple strategies for interaction - browsing/skimming, tables of contents, indices, scanning for pictures, distinction by text styles, etc. - are only poorly aped by any digital medium. In the time it takes for me to load even a small local search utility and then render a page or two, I can flip through a text, look up a person's name in the index, check the references on 3 pages, and then scan the bibliography.
The main drawback of the book as interface is its nondynamic content - new information means a new book. However, considering how old a lot of the documentation out there is (when was the last time the Linux-Hardware-FAQ was updated?), in practice that's not a problem limited to the paper media.
I'm so glad a less than rave review of a book finally appeared here on slashdot. Maybe it will finally shut up those conspiracy nuts who claim that all book reviews on slashdot are good only to make money off the link to Amazon.
I think the reason most reviews here are positive is because most people won't invest the time to write a review of a book they didn't like.
Confusing the issue is the fact that IBM refers to "NetBIOS" as both the API and the wire protocol (NetBEUI). Microsoft will sometimes use the term "NBT" for NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I have to learn to stop relying on my memory. Thank's for the correction.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The "rumor" is true - in fact AT+T/Sun won a legal round with Microsoft a few months back allowing them access to the Windows 2000 source code.
So while your points 2 through 4 are valid, Sun's SMB implementation is up-to-date and presumably 100% compatible with Microsoft's (since they are based on the same code). I believe Sun's implementation also does Domain Controllers (beta in Samba) and will be Active Directory compatible.
That having been said, in the recent ZDNet "NOS Shootout", Sun installed Samba rather than LanMan/Unix because is faster.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
This is an extremely dry book that is about as fascinating to read as a man page
Am I the only one, even amongst fellow nerds, who finds man pages interesting, contrary to what is implied in the review ?
Ok there are some poor ones, but most Linux man pages are quite good.
Samba is (presumably) so named because it permits Linux to communicate using SMB (Server Message Blocks). SMB (as I understand it) is the upper-level protocol used by NetBIOS. NetBIOS is supposed to go away in Windows 2000 (aka NT 5). From that point forward, there will be no need for SMB and thus Samba.
The above is intended more as a question than a statement; is my analysis or understanding of the facts incorrect?
I bought this book at a recent computer show. I found it very interesting, and quite easy to read. In fact, I read straight through it in two days.
It provides a great deal of useful background information about CIFS/SMB/MS networking, in a clear sensible fashion. I learned a great deal about browsing, elections, primary and backup domain servers, etc. Because of this, I would even recommend the book to pure NT admins (poor suckers).
For Samba admins, the book is invaluable. It contains a clear concise, indexed, explaination of every configuration parameter. Several parameters that I didn't understand in Samba's included docs made sense after reading this. The book also has a large number of useful examples.
All of the information in the book could probably be obtained free from the net. However, it would
be in pieces from various sources. This book collects and organizes it.
I highly recommended this book.
I believe what you're looking for is smbclient or smbmount.
note: for smbmount, you'll have to have smbfs support in your kernel.
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
Look in the examples directory of the samba
distribution... there is a script to use SMBClient
to set up your printcap on a linux box to print
to SMB shared printers on a WinNT/95/98 machine.
The included script works for me with almost no
changes.
(Was that a run-on sentence?)
Well, John's book only deals with Samba 1.9.18
:-)
while 2.0.x has been out for a while. The latest
is 2.0.4b.
Two other members of the Samba team, Jerry Carter
and Richard Sharpe, have written another Samba
book: SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours.
Don't worry about the Title. We tried to make
the book useful for the novice as well as the
more experienced user of Samba.
Check it out on Amazon and FatBrain.
Check out the great review on Amazon