This is only a brief description that's covering the problems I experienced when setting-up file & print services with GNU/Linux. I'm using both Windows 98 and Windows 2000 as workstations and I want them to be able to share files and printers with other devices. Because I don't want to install a full-featured domain-controller with Windows 2000, Samba with Windows is the best solution (even better than running Windows 2000, several benchmarks show that GNU/Linux + Samba is faster than native Windows 2000).

2. What is Samba?

I quote www.samba.org

Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients.

3. Useful resources

Please honor the homepage of Samba a visit : www.samba.org

4. Packages and installation

There are three different branches for Samba, 2.0, 2.2 and the HEAD-branch. The HEAD-branch is mainly the development branch and not really 100% stable. When you want to use all features from Samba, you should install 2.2 and not 2.0. The latest distro's come pre-installed with this version. When you have an older version installed, remove it and install the new Samba-server package. When using RedHat 7.1 - default shipped with Samba 2.0 - I couldn't just upgrade my rpm-packages. I first had to uninstall the server (rpm -e samba) and reinstall the new server with the 'no-deps' setting on.

Downloads can be found at http://ftp.easynet.be/samba/download.html

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Samba

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