Customer Reviews

The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide (Bruce Perens' Open Source Series)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book is great, it gives you all background, detailed description, step by step guides etc. All you need to know about samba is there. However you should keep in mind that this is pretty much a printed version of http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/ , so the same content is available for free on the web site. I personally like old school paper books, that's the only reason I bought it. If you don't care, maybe you should check out the site first and it might be all you need.

The Official Samba-3 HOWTO and Reference Guide is an ambitious work that is going to have a lot of admins slapping their foreheads and saying "Aha! So that's how it's done."

Having used Samba for quite a while, but never having felt confident enough to try anything overly exotic in the office, this book helped (and inspired) me to dust off my minimal configurations and go for more complete integration with the existing Windows infrastructure. The authors are knowledgable and speak from production experience, punctuating the technical content with helpful comments and best practices for folks who depend on Samba to get their job done. The tone of the book is also realistic about explaining what's in Samba, what might be in Samba, and what's not very likely to ever be in Samba. (I think it's great that members of the Samba team can be frank, and aren't taking advantage of an opportunity to toot their own horns, promise the moon and a bunch of vaporware.)

Even if you consider yourself fairly advanced with Samba configuration, this book - the distilled knowledge and experience of great number of HOWTOs and configuration examples - is likely to be useful for you. It's probably not for rank beginners, but that's part of being a good reference work for production admins.

My only complaint with the book has to do with a few typos and editing problems. (LaTex can be unforgiving, eh?) Also, I found Part II, the quick start/cookbook section, to be a little repetitive, and felt that it could have used a little more editorial oversight. (Hint: Don't read it straight through - you don't need to anyway.) But Part III, which is the meat of the book, is much better done, and I'd say damn near indispensible if you're serious about bridging the gulf between Un*x and Windows technologies in your workplace.

This book is a great step by step guide, reference, and learning tool. The organization allowed me to drill into those areas of interest without having to wade through unnecessary details. When I wanted to drill into the technology - the information was there! I was able to find concise, accurate instructions, as well as theory and background. I think it is especially helpful to the Windows skilled sysadmin who is looking to deploy or support UNIX interoperability. Having the help files at the end of the book was also very helpful. I would recommend this book to anyone who has both Linux/Unix and Windows systems!

Anxious to set up samba at home I headed down to the local bookstore and picked up this book at full price (perhaps the only samba 3 book there). I think I read about 1/4 of the book and have now decided it will be going back tomorrow. It's easy to read if you have some Windows and some Linux/UNIX experience, but every chapter is plagued with sentences an 8th grade student failing English could have pointed to problems! Sometimes it was difficult to determine what the meaning of some statements should be. In one chapter a discussion of non-encrypted passwords repeated advantages from the discussion of encrypted passwords, advantages that clearly do not exist!

It feels likes the HOWTOs from the Internet were simply copied, so why wasn't there time to edit?

What a fantastic reference! Not only does this fully explain how to install and configure Samba, but this includes how to troubleshoot and "insert" Samba in to a fully functioning Microsoft environment. This book includes a fantastic overview, and detailed discussion of how the Microsoft domain model works - invaluable for using Samba effectively.

The endless tidbits of information were invaluable to me when installing and configuring. For instance, just what happens when you run SWAT the first time..., How to get a sample server up quickly..., How to connect from UNIX/Linux clients... And, how to use LDAP authentication.

I highly recommend this HOWTO for anyone using Samba.

This book reports the Samba 2 configuration examples and seems to ignore that Samba 3 "talks" directly with LDAP without the numerous "scripts" that are reported in the examples. This ia a Samba 2 daptation to the LDAP directory service and simply sucks!
If you want to make a donation to the Samba "father" John Terpstra, then buy the book but for real stuff, simply go in Internet, you will find exactly the same obsolete documentation, not a word more nor less.

I tried to get started with SAMBA, but could never get off the ground using material printed in many Linux books. After going through this book, I realized many key concepts that I was missing, such as windows domain accounts to Unix account mappings and such.

This book has an abundance of information in it. Some things that look exciting were some information about the PDC/BDC style integratrion and also Active Directory Kerberos integration. There's also a section on CUPS integration.

Overall I found this resource quite invaluable. Maybe there's online material that is better, but for printed text this is one of the best books out there...

This book is a great resource for anyone who is using Samba to connect MS-Windows machines into a Unix environment for file sharing and print serving.

I cannot say that I have read the book in its entirety, but I have used it to troubleshoot some common mistakes in the configuration of my smb.conf file. Moreover it was useful in defining a simple batch file to manually re-connect my shares without having Windows re-build the connection at login.

I foresee myself consulting this book as my needs expand in usage of Samba as a networking bridge between Windows and the greater world that computing has to offer.

Samba is fairly simple at its basic configuration. When things start getting large and complex is when this book really shines. The authors give examples and scenarios of small simple configs and works their way up to very complex configs. Consider who the authors are and you can only expect the best.

I have already used the content of this book in many consulting jobs and have found it very useful. The content is geared to helping a Microsoft centric sysadmin with not only Microsoft concepts but with providing an alternative to using windows for file and print services. If your customers are like mine they want a choice.
I highly recommend this book. A must read.