Customer Reviews

The Definitive Guide to Samba 3

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A few years ago, Samba came on the scene as an effective and cheap [free!] way to get unix and Microsoft Windows machines on a common network to do file sharing. Very popular. In late 2003, the latest major revision was released, Samba 3. Now this text gives an independent and indepth evaluation of all its features.

My impression from this book is that if you're already using Samba 2 and just upgrade to 3, you can essentially do all your existing procedures unchanged. Apart from bug fixes, of course, Samba 3 is, to good approximation, a superset of Samba 2. Makes the transition easier. This does mean that if you are using Samba 2, and have a text for it, and you upgrade, you may not really need this book.

Ah, but when it comes to specifically new features, then the book shines. Smith goes into sometimes excrutiating details about items like improved Unicode handling and Active Directory integration. He points out the useful features; the details of which can be nontrivial, and which form the key sections of the narrative.

All this is pitched to someone [you] that he assumes to be a unix sysadmin who has at least several months experience. Don't be intimidated by the length of the text. Sections are usable on an as-needed basis. In other words, you don't have to plough through all or even most of it, before you can start doing useful activities with Samba 3.

Roderick W. Smith is the author of several books on Linux/Unix computing, including Apress' very good offering aptly titled The Definitive Guide to Samba 3.

On six hundred pages, the author explains just about everything there is to know about SMB and CIFS, with a focus on the free Samba implementation. That is the first part of the book.

The second part of the book introduces Samba configuration as well as configuring file and printer shares and managing Samba accounts. This is then followed by more advanced topics such as the configuration of a master browser and a domain controller. The chapters on Securing Samba and that on Samba's Interactions with other protocols are worth the price of the book by themselves.

Part four is dedicated to a huge number of Samba Tips & Tricks which include the migration of a Windows domain to Samba and backups, as well as a chapter on troubleshooting.

Once again, and as usual, I missed an in-depth discussion of integrating Samba with LDAP. The author rightly points out that it is a difficult proposition, and he unfortunately only skims over the LDAP-related parameters of Samba.

All in all, this is an excellent book for any systems administrator who is either undertaking the installation of Samba or who wants to know more about its innards.