Using Samba

chromatic, another of our fine group of book reviewers, took some time with a draft copy of the new O'Reilly and Associates book Using Samba. Written by Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown & Peter Kelly, this book helps you learn how to setup Samba, as well as information on the protocol itself. Click below to learn more. Using Samba author Kelly, Peter / Collier-Brown, David / Eckstein, Robert pages 416 publisher O'Reilly & Associates, 11/1999 rating 8/10 reviewer chromatic ISBN 1565924495 summary Using Samba takes you from heterogenous network purgatory into manageable bliss by helping you install, configure, and maintain Samba installations.

Overview

Samba is a suite of software tools implementing the SMB protocol. With Samba, you can share files and printers from a Unix-based server to Windows-based clients. You can even control a Windows NT based domain with a Unix server, potentially saving thousands of dollars in software licensing fees and administration costs.

Using Samba takes you from your initial need for Samba in a heterogenous network to installation, through configuration, and ending up with performance tweaking. Most of the focus is on the server side, but there's information about the SMB protocol itself and client setup.

Note: This review is based upon a draft copy of the book. The final copy has been reorganized and some parts have been rewritten. Most of the information still applies.

What's Good?

As is Samba, Using Samba is Unix-variant agnostic, with installation tips for multiple OS's. This covers download sites, compilation, and even SWAT, the web-based configuration interface in Samba 2.0.x. The authors have a clear, clean style (as you'd expect from O'Reilly) and take a common-sense, practical approach to various issues such as security and configuration. The authors also focus on additional Samba utilties like smbclient and smbmount, which are useful for troubleshooting.

The chapter on tweaking for performance is excellent. More books deserve chapters like this. The authors go through the various bottlenecks and demonstrate how modifying one parameter affects the others. (I suspect the general principles are applicable elsewhere.)

The real gem of this book is chapter nine, the troubleshooting tree. If you're stuck with weird behavior and you have a deadline to meet, this chapter alone may be well worth the cover price. It starts by discussing Samba logs, moves into trace and tcpdump, spends pages and pages on an extremely detailed Fault Tree, and ends up with pointers to other resources.

What's not so good?

(These are really minor points. My recommendation is that if you're looking at Samba, you should read the sample chapter and then buy this book.)

The chapter on configuring Windows clients seemed a little out of place, given that this book promotes Samba as a replacement or alternative to a Windows server. That's pretty straightforward, and probably not why you'd buy a book about Samba. The NT Domain model discusison is valuable, though, given that a Samba server may have to act as a Domain Controller or a Master Browser, and that can have big implications.

Using Samba covers both versions 1.9.x and 2.0.x. It would have made more sense to me to stick with the latest stable version and cover it in detail. However, most of the options are the same between the two, and the differences are clearly marked. There are only a handful of places where this comes up. As I said, it's only a minor issue.

The Bottom Line

If you know you need Samba and want some help setting it up and configuring it, this is your book. If you're curious about what Samba can do for your network, flip through the first chapter and rest assured that this book will help you get things under control.

Purchase this book at fatbrain

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Learning the Samba
What is Samba?
What Can Samba Do For Me?
Getting Familiar with a SMB/CIFS Network
Microsoft Implementations
An Overview of the Samba Distribution
How Can I Get Samba?
What's New in Samba 2.0?
And That's Not All...

2. Installing Samba on a Unix System
Downloading the Samba Distribution
Configuring Samba
Compiling and Installing Samba
A Basic Samba Configuration File
Starting the Samba Daemons
Testing the Samba Daemons

3. Configuring Windows Clients
Setting Up Windows 95/98 Computers
Setting Up Windows NT 4.0 Computers
An Introduction to SMB/CIFS

4. Disk Shares
Learning the Samba Configuration File
Special Sections
Configuration File Options
Server Configuration
Disk Share Configuration
Networking Options with Samba
Virtual Servers
Logging Configuration Options

5. Browsing and Advanced Disk Shares
Browsing
Filesystem Differences
File Permissions and Attributes on MS-DOS and Unix
Name Mangling and Case
Locks and Oplocks

6. Users, Security, and Domains
Users and Groups
Controlling Access to Shares
Authentication Security
Passwords
Windows Domains
Logon Scripts

7. Printing and Name Resolution
Sending Print Jobs to Samba
Printing to Windows Client Printers
Name Resolution with Samba

8. Additional Samba Information
Supporting Programmers
Magic Scripts
Internationalization
WinPopup Messages
Recently Added Options
Miscellaneous Options
Backups with smbtar

9. Troubleshooting Samba
The Tool Bag
The Fault Tree
Extra Resources

A. Configuring Samba with SSL

B. Samba Performance Tuning

C. Samba Configuration Option Quick Reference

D. Summary of Samba Daemons and Commands

E. Downloading Samba with CVS

F. Sample Configuration File

Comments

Questions and comments

[smileyy]

Does the book cover 2.0.6? This is somewhat important, because smbmount has been changed to work with mount, and I'm still figuring out the best way to utilize this.

Secondly, I've heard that this book will be available online, in addition to dead tree format, for those who are cheap, or want to explore new economic models for content.

Re:Questions and comments

[HoustonX]

http://us1.samba.org/samba/samba.html

on the front page, mentions
"O'Reilly have released their new book Using Samba under an open content license! The book has been adopted by the Samba Team as the "official" Samba book and we will strive to keep it up to date. O'Reilly have sent us the full sources for the book and we will be making it available online as soon as we can, we just need to work out some formatting and conversion issues. We also plan to make it directly accessible from SWAT. "

and yes, I'm cheap, and still learning about Samba, so.....WOoHOo!

Of course it discusses Windows client configs!

[Chuck Milam]

"The chapter on configuring Windows clients seemed a little out of place, given that this book promotes Samba as a replacement or alternative to a Windows server. That's pretty straightforward, and probably not why you'd buy a book about Samba."

I hope that I'm just reading this passage incorrectly, but as written, it makes no sense to me at all. Information on how to configure Windows clients is exactly why I'd consider purchasing a book on Samba. Samba is intended as a "a replacement or alternative to a Windows server", so of course there will be Windows clients connecting to it. Also, it is very likely that a Samba server will be dropped into a MS (NT, Win95, whatever) network environment, and will have to "play nice" with the exsisting network machines. Therefore, it is highly appropriate to have a section devoted to the configuration of Windows clients in the book. As someone who has not regularly used a MS-Windows OS in many years, I would surely appreciate having the reference on Windows clients to fall back on.

I'll Buy It

[Erore]

I read the sample chapter last night. I enjoyed the writing style and it really conveyed a lot of information to me quickly.

I'm approaching this from a Samba newbie standpoint so all the information was interesting and helpful. Experienced users might not find it so. But, I believe a program that is always evolving as Samba does and adding new configurations parameters will have few masters who don't use a reference book. I might not always have an answer, but I almost always know where to get one.

I almost wouldn't mind seeing a book about how to replace your NT server with Linux. Meaning, if I have an NT server running file serving, print serving, fax serving, and Exchange e-mail, what do I need to get on a Linux box to replace it wholesale so my users have no idea what just happened? Especially if I have Mac as well as Windows clients. I guess I'm talking about a small business server guide to using Linux instead of NT.

I do hope they keep this book up to date at the Samba site. With the constant changes some of this information gets old quickly.

Re:I'll Buy It

[Cally]

Encore. I'm in exactly this position at work. We've just had three horrible Microsoft-related crashes -> network downtime -> very unhappy management consultants (especially when we lost four days' work and a whole day of backups) (not my fault !!). I'm hoping to sneak a couple of stealth-mode Linux boxes onto our network & not revealing their existence tp the PHBs until they've been running smoothly and transparently for a few months.

Are you listening, O'Reilly ? :-)

--

Re:I'll Buy It

[fReNeTiK]

If I have an NT server running file serving, print serving, fax serving, and Exchange e-mail, what do I need to get on a Linux box to replace it wholesale so my users have no idea what just happened?

This is precisely what I'm trying to do right now. File and print serving doesn't represent a problem. Samba does this fine.
I'm stuck on faxing and Exchange replacement tough. Dos anybody know of a good network faxing solution for Linux?
Replacing Exchange alltogether is going to be hard tough. I don't even know if there is a MAPI system available for Unices at all. And Exchange does alot of other things (Calendaring, for example).. Is there an alternative way of doing this?
--

Re:I'll Buy It

[dirtstar]

The only MAPI aware unix mail server I know of is HP openmail. It is not open-source though.

http://www.ice.hp.com/cyc/om/00/index.html

Re:I'll Buy It

[ahodgson]

Hylafax - www.hylafax.org - is a good network fax server with Windoze client software available.

messagedirect.com sells an IMAP client for Windoze that has MAPI support.

Haven't seen any good calendaring stuff yet.

Re:I'll Buy It

[ahodgson]

And of course Outlook and Eudora do MAPI while being IMAP clients.

Re:I'll Buy It

[richi]

I'm stuck on ... Exchange replacement

Ahem. Use our product free, or use it in its commercial product incarnation. Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX (yes, really).

richi.
--
Richi Jennings
http://www.hp.com/go/openmail
Hewlett-Packard Company
"Practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty"

Looking At It In Different Ways

[chromatic]

I didn't think about it that way... My line of reasoning was that Samba allows you to replace a Windows server with a Unix box in an existing network.

If you have an existing network set up, your Windows clients are probably already configured. The assumption there is that anyone setting up Samba has already configured the clients for one server or another, and the configuration method is the same no matter what type of server they use. Of course, you can also set up a network from scratch, with absolutely no Windows servers, which renders that assumption invalid.

Thanks for the comment. Now I understand why that chapter was there!

--
QDMerge 0.4!

Re:Looking At It In Different Ways

[GoRK]

In practical use, there are sometimes quite a few little bitty differences/tweaks on the client side that can optimize performance with a samba server vs. a regular NT server. Even in replacement situations, this chapter gives valuable advice on how best to configure the *CLIENTS* for *SAMBA* since it really doesn't work 100% exactly like NT.

~GoRK

Re:Looking At It In Different Ways

[trog]

This is untrue and misinformed. As an admin of both NT Server and samba installations, I can tell you that client configurations are different between the two when useing NT Workstation clients. With samba, you must use smbpasswd to create a machine account on the server. With NT, you can do this at the client by simply providing the username/passwd of an Admin who has permissions to add workstations to the domain.

Of course, this may be fixed now...new samba out last week, and I haven't had the oppertunity to use it yet...

Re:Looking At It In Different Ways

[Anonymous Coward]

True, though it's not exactly ready to replace NT fileservers in the near future -- even if it's operating as a standalone server.

I've done extensive benchmarking and samba is 30 - even 60% slower in some cases. As well, some tweaks to make reads and writes faster only work for particular clients -- so a mixed network of 95, 98 and NT is a no no.

We would *REALLY* like to replace our two 3 NT server file server arrays each connected to fibre channel raid arrays, but in experience samba doesn't even come close -- especially when these machines have multiple 100mbps ethernet cards.

As for the home network, maybe. If you have a 10mbps network, definitely. I've achieved 900+k/s on a 10mbps network. On a small 100mbps network, it performs pretty good as well (about 15-25% slower than NT server). The problems only start becoming evident when a number of clients start connecting concurrently.

As for setting samba up, it can be fairly easy.

Just get samba installed (not very hard)
Put swat in inetd or tcpserver (and in services)
Load up swat and now smb.conf is easy to play with
(not that it's hard to edit the text file)

Once that's done, just read the Speed and Speed2 text files (wherever the doc files are installed), and experiment on which tweaks get you the best performance.

Don't buy the book! There's plenty of documentation included with the program distribution. I learned just about everything I needed to know in one afternoon, reading the docs and experimenting with the different options and server setups. Remember swat, it's very useful. Even if you dont want to use it to config, you can look at all the advanced options and push on the help buttons and it will immediately explain what they are.

Re:Looking At It In Different Ways

[edgy]

I've set up a Samba server for over 100 NT clients as a PDC. All the clients are using shares of the server to save data and copy programs from the server, etc., and we've never had any real crashes or issues that haven't been taken care of.

The speed of the server hasn't been a problem for us, but we're only using 1 100Mbit ethernet card in it.

I think some of the limitations you may be experiencing may be due to Linux and the fact that it doesn't multithread network cards yet.

Running Samba under Solaris or an operating system that can support much bigger machines than Intel does can give you even more scalability with more clients than Windows NT servers can. You also get great reliability. I haven't had any problems with the setup we have here as far as reliability or compatibility.

Re:Looking At It In Different Ways

[jabberw0k]

I suspect a sizable percentage of readers will read this book looking for precisely this chapter.

Typical reader's thoughts: "I have a couple Windows boxes, and I hear that if I buy some network cards and a copy of Linux, I can use something called Samba as a server?"

Good licence

[cybaea]

The licence is kind of interesting.

"Using Samba" may be freely reproduced and distributed in any form, in any medium physical or electronic, in whole or in part, provided that the terms of this license are adhered to and that the reproduction includes this license or a reference to it...

Read the whole story at http://www.oreilly.co m/catalog/samba/chapter/licenseinfo.html.

Re:Good licence

[Anonymous Coward]

so where can I get an html copy?

Why can't samba provide user list for Win9x?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 9x users are still unable to obtain a user list from the samba server for user-level file sharing. I'm just curious as to what the stumbling blocks. Undocumented Windows calls? Crypto that hasn't been cracked yet? Fear of lawsuits from MS? What?

Re:Why can't samba provide user list for Win9x?

[zimbu]

Its because MS wants to keep parts of the SMB protocal closed, so only WinNT can be used as Domain Controller. I can't stand those hypocrits at MS who want open standards in markets they don't control, IM and other chat programs, but have no problem with closed protocals on the stuff they control. They could at least have the balls to be open about what they're doing rather than spewing some crap about doing whats best for the consumer.

Why couldn't this have come out a few months ago?

[joealba]

Then I wouldn't have had to buy the Sam's book "24 Hours of Samba Hell that will save you hundreds of dollars in Windows NT licenses - and your networked software will never know the difference" -- Paraphrased, obviously... :)


Joe

"Just remember,
Things could always be worse..
You could be veal."

Can anyone provide a link to the full text?

[Andrew Cady]

Like the subject says. This book might be worth buying in print, but since it's not out (or even finished, apparantly) yet It'd be great to get online in the meantime.

So anybody know where?

Re:Can anyone provide a link to the full text?

[Industrial Disease]

The book is out. I flipped through it at the computer shop a couple of days ago. The reviewer may have had an early preview copy long enough to review it, but that doesn't mean the book hasn't reached shelves in the meantime.

online version

[Anonymous Coward]

where is the online version of the book?

Re:online version

[Anonymous Coward]

It is at

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/ index.html

since a couple of days ;-)
B-o-K (http://bok.selwerd.cx)

it will not cover 2.0.6 (especially smbmount)

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

This book was originally scheduled for some time around August and had essentially been completed then.
Maybe it has been updated to cover newer levels since then so as to avoid duplicating the 'Samba in 24 hours' information, but 2.0.6 is less that a week old so no chance there.
If in doubt, see how smbmount is documented - that is the item where the user interface has undergone major changes recently.

Re:it will not cover 2.0.6 (especially smbmount)

[smileyy]

That's too bad. But, I imagine the non-dead-trees version will be updated at some point in the near future (after it gets online, anyway) to include this information.

I'm not the target audience, but ...

[timothy]

I'm glad to see reviews of a draft copy of anything here on slashdot!

Ahead of the curve ... (and nicely behind the curve with the reviews of older SciFi etc, too).

Cool!

timothy

Not yet available

[a2800276]

On the Samba Homepage there's a short note saying they got the text from O'Reilly and are now working on formatting it.

The book has been adopted by the Samba Team as the "official" Samba book and we will strive to keep it up to date. O'Reilly have sent us the full sources for the book and we will be making it available online as soon as we can, we just need to work out some formatting and conversion issues. We also plan to make it directly accessible from SWAT. A huge thanks to O'Reilly for this great step forward in the documentation of Samba!

Re:Not yet available

[Bob-K]

It may not yet be available online, but it is in bookstores. I hadn't even known it was coming, but as soon as I saw the review this morning, I headed out to the bookstore, and there it was.

Very nice indeed. All of the Samba books that I've seen are pretty good, but this one has it all.

It IS available

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a copy at Borders today.

Re:It IS available

[copal7]

jeez...got my copy last week...

almost snarfed up a hairball when i found out it finally came in. it really is quite pathetic how excited i get over o'reilly books. they're like a non-liquid form of heroin. really.

btw- the samba team is woking on making the book available via SWAT....swank....

Samba Passwords vs. System Passwords

[MaCa]

We are trying to implement a single-login -- ie, NIS + NFS + etc -- procedure here in the lab and to add this facility to the windows users, what would be really apreciatted by those ( users would be able to mount their home dir everywhere, even in the windows boxes, avoding lost of data in the computers jungle and would need to remember one single password only ) and by the adm. ( that would have fewer places to take care of... )

Samba would be the perfect tool to this particular problem IFF it could use the system's password authentication scheme ( in our case, the NIS passwd DB ) instead of its own. I thought that there was an smb.conf option that would make it use the sys's passwd but it seems that there ins't such option!

Now, would any of the fine slashdotters help me out with this problem?

--- "I may be drunk, but in the morning I will be sober, while you will still be stupid and ugly." -Winston Churchill

Re:Samba Passwords vs. System Passwords

[fReNeTiK]

Samba would be the perfect tool to this particular problem IFF it could use the system's password authentication scheme ( in our case, the NIS passwd DB ) instead of its own.

This probably won't help much but... Samba doesn't use a separate user/pwd Database. It uses the underlying unix for authentification. You can assign several "virtual" samba-users to one real unix user account tough (trough smbusers file).
--

Re:Samba Passwords vs. System Passwords

[headkick]

I read that Samba can now be configured to use domain authentication when connecting a Samba box to an existing NT domain. You need to use smbpasswd to add the machine to the NT domain and set "security=domain" in your smb.conf. See "security=domain" under http://us1.samba.org/s amba/docs/man/smb.conf.5.html#security for details. I'm not sure if this helps at all, but good luck.

Re:Samba Passwords vs. System Passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

False. It uses smbpasswd. You can synchronize your unix accounts and passwords with it though. To get NIS working properly with it, you'd have to do some tweaking and customizing of your own though.

Re:Samba Passwords vs. System Passwords

[fReNeTiK]

You are right of course. That is unless you use unencrypted passwords, which I'm still doing in my home network. In this case, I believe, samba does the authentification trough unix...
--

Re:Samba Passwords vs. System Passwords

[Anonymous Coward]

Cruise on over to linuxworld.com. They just had an article on that.
http://linuxworl d.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-11/lw-11-integration.html

Samba in 24 Hours..

[Anonymous Coward]

Samba in 24 Hours is quite a good book IMO, it has some case studies and discusses most areas very well and has some reall nifty sample configs included

Linux Replacement for Exchange Server

[dragonfly_blue]

I found a cheap replacement for Exchange server, that provides a collaborative calendar, contacts, tasks, etc.

Configuration is a bit tricky though.

I would recommend this setup for no more than 5 computers, but maybe with tweaking it could be set up and stable on more systems.

The way I did it involves using a feature of Outlook 98/2000, namely Web Folders, in conjunction with Microsoft Mail (Although it could be made to run over any email service.)

What I found is that by using Web Folders you can send updates to calendars, tasks, contacts, etc. through email messages, which are intercepted and executed by Outlook in the background (the user never "sees" these emails, they are deleted by Outlook after being processed.)

Exchange is extremely expensive as a standalone product. I am working rapidly to move to Linux based servers, as I do network installs for small legal firms (1-2 partners and 2-3 assistants/paralegals.) They simply can't keep up with the licensing.

Exchange has been the biggest barrier to complete Linux migration thus far, but I've been somewhat successful with this implementation. See the article on my website here.

http://www.dragonflydynamix.com/jvlmnlaw.htm

Is a whole new book really needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there really enough info and details about Samba to require a whole new Blue-spine O'Reilly book? Why couldn't it just be rolled into an expanded edition of "Networking Personal Computers With TCP/IP"? Actually, you'll want a copy of that book along with "Using Samba" in any case. Especially if you're wanting to bring online older hardware like MS-DOS and WFW systems.

Re:Is a whole new book really needed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Today I attended SGI's Linux University talk on Samba, featuring none other than Team developers Jeremy Allison and Herb (sorry I've forgotten your last name--Lest?).

Anyways, it was quite an amusing talk. There is most certainly enough to fill an O'Reilly book on the subject. The gist is that Samba is mostly bug-for-bug compatible with 95 and NT, etc. This seems to have several ramifications. First, SMB topology isn't as straightforward as one would like in a network protocol. Second, authentication issues are really touchy and it is all too easy to open up a machine to attack. If you want a modicum of security, you'll want to enable/disable the right features. Third, if you care anything about security, you won't run Microsoft Windows(TM) on your network. Lastly, and perhaps the primary need for solid documentation, the permutations of configuration and interoperation are large in number.

They recommended the book wholeheartedly, espousing that it will be distributed with Samba. I hope it covers the protocols in some detail and the reasons why Samba is even possible. There are really some quite interesting concepts involved. I hope, too, that O'Reilly has included some of those amusing anecdotes from behind the scenes.

Oh, and last note: it was mentioned that the goal of Samba was not to do windows, but to do windows networking better than windows. The idea is that someday nobody should need Samba. ;)

Ok, the talk was so good, there's more: Microsoft Engineering is reputed to be assisting in the squashing of Samba bugs (at least by sending in customer reports that lead to Samba integration issues). Of course, Microsoft Marketing is reputed to hate Samba. ;)

Thanks, guys, for an excellent talk! Everyone should also thank SGI for supporting Samba.

They'll do better than they did with NAG

[Anonymous Coward]

O'Reilly "Open Sourced" the Network Administrator's Guide (by Olaf Kirsch?) and frankly, they didn't do very well.

I especially like the clause where another publisher can put out the book but must put a credit to O'Reilly on the outside cover.

Wait for the SAMBA BLACK BOOK...

[Anonymous Coward]

The SAMBA BLACK BOOK will be the bible of them all.. It covers everything from A to Z... One bad thing.. It will be published in Janurary... I'm working on the French translation and the early edition is VERY VERY nice...

Echange Replacement.

[pendragn]

I THINK that lotus is planning on releasing a version of Notes server for linux, that could be a replacement, though not a drop in replacement. Other than that I'd suggest an IMAP server and replicating Exchanges other features (I don't use exchange, so I don't know all of them) such as Calendering and Colaboration and others with Web based apps (using php and mySQL and such).

does it cover smbmount at all?

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

Looking at the index, it does not appear to cover smbmount at all. I know that one of the authors (D C-B) has a Solaris background, not sure about the other two.

The new smbmount is really easy to use, I have not tried it with fstab yet. Once I do, it will go up in my home-page which covers this sort of stuff.

Re:does it cover smbmount at all?

[davecb]

Nope, although we do mention it. Smbmount was suffering from a lack of maintainers during almost the whole period that the book was being written. I'm glad to see support for it coming back.

Also, smbmount is Linux-specific. So Andrew wrote smbsh, the samba shell. It's an OS-agnostic alternative.

--dave

Robert Eckstein: Some Answers

[mocha]

I see Dave Collier-Brown already tacked a few questions above, so I'll deal with a few others.

OPEN-CONTENT LICENSE:

Some info about the open-content license:

1) About two months ago, Andrew Tridgell and Andy Oram (the editor) and myself agreed to publish this book under an open-content license. This was primarily at the behest of Andrew Tridgell--so be sure to send him and Jeremy Allison many pizzas as thanks.

2) The book went to print about a month ago. We tried to get as quick a turnaround time as possible, since this book has been delayed a couple of times already. Why was it delayed, you ask? Let's just say that Andrew Tridgell is a very thorough reviewer.

3) After the final edits went through, we sent the source in SGML format to the good people at samba.org. That was a couple of weeks ago. They are currently formatting it for online use, and they will also be maintaining it. When it becomes available, you can download it from samba.org.

DOES THE BOOK COVER 2.0.6?

No, it does not. At the time it went to print, 2.0.5 was the latest Samba release in existence.

WINDOWS CLIENT CONFIG CHAPTER

The reply is correct. You want to be able to configure Windows 95/98/NT Workstation to use with Samba because it masquerades as an NT server. However, because Samba and NT don't like to coexist, there are issues. (And, don't forget the dreaded encrypted password problem that all first-time Samba admins face). Topics like that are what this chapter tries to address... from the client side.

RE: I'LL BUY IT

Hey, if you want to write a book on doing exactly that, send a proposal to proposals@ora.com.

RE: GOOD LICENSE

You can thank Andy Oram at O'Reilly for that license. This is likely a harbinger for future O'Reilly books.

RE: PROVIDE USER LIST FOR WIN 9x

Samba 2.1 may provide some relief to your grief, although I do not know the exact mechanics yet. You can use Samba 2.1 beta right now for NT authentication, however. The "Users and Passwords" chapter explains how to do this.

RE: WHOLE NEW BOOK NEEDED

Yeah, I would think so. Samba is getting pretty big, and if you saw the size of SMB/CIFS (and know that there is no complete implementation in existence, according to Andrew Tridgell), you'd be aghast. I was.

Thanks for the comments, everyone!

- Robert Eckstein (O'Reilly and Associates)