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.

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.

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

[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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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