Samba (software)
Encyclopedia
Samba is a free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 re-implementation, originally developed by Andrew Tridgell
Andrew Tridgell
Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell is an Australian computer programmer best known as the author of and contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm....

, of the SMB/CIFS
Server Message Block
In computer networking, Server Message Block , also known as Common Internet File System operates as an application-layer network protocol mainly used to provide shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. It also provides an...

 networking protocol. As of version 3, Samba provides file
Computer file
A computer file is a block of arbitrary information, or resource for storing information, which is available to a computer program and is usually based on some kind of durable storage. A file is durable in the sense that it remains available for programs to use after the current program has finished...

 and print
Input/output
In computing, input/output, or I/O, refers to the communication between an information processing system , and the outside world, possibly a human, or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals or data received by the system, and outputs are the signals or data sent from it...

 services
Windows Service
On Microsoft Windows operating systems, a Windows service is a long-running executable that performs specific functions and which is designed not to require user intervention. Windows services can be configured to start when the operating system is booted and run in the background as long as...

 for various Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 clients
Client (computing)
A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network....

 and can integrate with a Windows Server domain
Windows Server domain
A Windows domain is a collection of security principals that share a central directory database. This central database contains the user accounts and security information for...

, either as a Primary Domain Controller
Primary Domain Controller
A Primary Domain Controller is a server computer in a Windows domain. A domain is a group of computers , where access to a variety of computer resources is controlled by the PDC. Various account types exist in the domain, the most basic is the "guest" or "anonymous login" account...

 (PDC) or as a domain member. It can also be part of an Active Directory
Active Directory
Active Directory is a directory service created by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems. Server computers on which Active Directory is running are called domain controllers....

 domain.

Samba runs on most Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 and Unix-like
Unix-like
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 systems, such as GNU/Linux, Solaris, AIX and the BSD
Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...

 variants, including Apple's Mac OS X Server
Mac OS X Server
Mac OS X Server is a Unix server operating system from Apple Inc. The server edition of Mac OS X is architecturally identical to its desktop counterpart, except that it includes work group management and administration software tools...

 (which was added to the Mac OS X client in version 10.2). Samba is standard on nearly all distributions of Linux and is commonly included as a basic system service
Services menu
The Services menu is a user interface element in a computer operating system. The services are programs that accept input from the user selection, process it, and optionally put the result back in the clipboard. The concept originated in the NeXTSTEP operating system, from which it was carried...

 on other Unix-based operating systems as well. Samba is released under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....

. The name Samba
Samba
Samba is a Brazilian dance and musical genre originating in Bahia and with its roots in Brazil and Africa via the West African slave trade and African religious traditions. It is recognized around the world as a symbol of Brazil and the Brazilian Carnival...

comes from SMB (Server Message Block
Server Message Block
In computer networking, Server Message Block , also known as Common Internet File System operates as an application-layer network protocol mainly used to provide shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. It also provides an...

), the name of the standard protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system.

Early history

Andrew Tridgell
Andrew Tridgell
Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell is an Australian computer programmer best known as the author of and contributor to the Samba file server, and co-inventor of the rsync algorithm....

 developed the first version of Samba Unix in December 1991 and January 1992, as a PhD student at the Australian National University
Australian National University
The Australian National University is a teaching and research university located in the Australian capital, Canberra.As of 2009, the ANU employs 3,945 administrative staff who teach approximately 10,000 undergraduates, and 7,500 postgraduate students...

, using a packet sniffer
Packet sniffer
A packet analyzer is a computer program or a piece of computer hardware that can intercept and log traffic passing over a digital network or part of a network...

 to do network analysis of the protocol used by DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 Pathworks
Pathworks
Pathworks was the tradename used by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts for a series of programs that eased the interoperation of Digital's minicomputers with personal computers....

 server software. At the time of the first releases, versions 0.1, 0.5 and 1.0, all from the first half of January 1992, it did not have a proper name, and Tridgell just called it "a Unix file server for Dos Pathworks". At the time of version 1.0, he realized that he "had in fact implemented the netbios protocol" and that "this software could be used with other PC clients".

With a focus on interoperability
Interoperability
Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together . The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to...

 with Microsoft's LAN Manager
LAN Manager
LAN Manager was a Network Operating System available from multiple vendors and developed by Microsoft in cooperation with 3Com Corporation. It was designed to succeed 3Com's 3+Share network server software which ran atop a heavily modified version of MS-DOS.-Development history:LAN Manager was...

, Tridgell released "netbios for unix", nbserver, version 1.5 in December 1993. This release was the first to include client-software as well as a server. Also, at this time GPL2 was chosen as license.

Midway through the 1.5-series, the name was changed to smbserver. However, Tridgell got a trademark
Trademark
A trademark, trade mark, or trade-mark is a distinctive sign or indicator used by an individual, business organization, or other legal entity to identify that the products or services to consumers with which the trademark appears originate from a unique source, and to distinguish its products or...

 notice from the company "Syntax", who sold a product named TotalNet Advanced Server and owned the trademark for "SMBserver". The name "Samba" was derived by running the Unix command grep
Grep
grep is a command-line text-search utility originally written for Unix. The name comes from the ed command g/re/p...

 through the system dictionary
Words (Unix)
words is a standard file on all Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and is simply a newline delimited list of dictionary words. It is used, for instance, by spell checking programs....

 looking for words that contained the letters S, M, and B, in that order (i.e. grep -i '^s.*m.*b' /usr/share/dict/words). Following a similar strategy, an early mp3 filesharing program that preceded Napster used the Samba protocol and was thus named Simba.

Versions 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9 followed relatively quickly, with the latter being released in January 1995. Tridgell considers the adoption of CVS
Concurrent Versions System
The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...

 in May 1996 to mark the birth of the Samba Team, though there had been contributions from other people, especially Jeremy Allison
Jeremy Allison
Jeremy Allison is a computer programmer known for his contributions to the free software community, notably to Samba, a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol, released under the GNU General Public License....

, previously.

Version 2.0.0 was released in January 1999, and version 2.2.0 in April 2001.

Recent history

Version 3.0.0, released on 23 September 2003, was a major upgrade. Samba gained the ability to join Active Directory as a member, though not as a domain controller. Subsequent point-releases to 3.0 have added minor new features. Currently, the latest release in this series is 3.0.37, released 1 October 2009, and shipped on a voluntary basis. The 3.0.x series officially reached end-of-life on 5 August 2009.

Version 3.1 was used only for development.

With version 3.2, the project decided to move to time-based releases. New major releases, such as 3.3, 3.4, etc. will appear every 6 months. New features will only be added when a major release is done, point-releases will be only for bug fixes. Also, 3.2 marked a change of license from GPL2 to GPL3, with some parts released under LGPL3. The main technical change in version 3.2 was to autogenerate much of the DCE/RPC
DCE/RPC
DCE/RPC, short for "Distributed Computing Environment / Remote Procedure Calls", is the remote procedure call system developed for the Distributed Computing Environment...

-code that used to be handcrafted. Version 3.2.0 was released on 1 July 2008. It will be updated on an as-needed basis for security issues only and its current release is 3.2.15 from 1 October 2009. The 3.2.x series officially reached end-of-life on 1 March 2010.

Version 3.3.0 was released 27 January 2009 and is now at version 3.3.16 in this branch.

Version 3.4.0 was released 3 July 2009. This was the first release to include both Samba 3 and Samba 4 source code.

Version 3.4.14 was released 26 July 2011. It is the latest stable release of the Samba 3.4 series.

Version 3.5.0 was released 1 March 2010. This was the first release to include experimental support for SMB2.

Version 3.5.11 was released on 4 August 2011. It is the latest stable release of the Samba 3.5 series.

Version 3.6.0 was released on 9 August 2011. This is the first branch which include full support for SMB2.

Version 4.0 is planned as a major rewrite that will enable Samba to be an Active Directory domain controller. After three years of development, the first technical preview (4.0.0TP1) was released in January 2006. Subsequently, new previews and then alphas have followed regularly. The most recent version is 4.0.0-alpha17, released on 12 September 2011. Andrew Bartlett has indicated that alpha 17 could be the last before moving to prerelease status.

Features

Samba allows file and print sharing between computers running Windows and computers running Unix. It is an implementation of dozens of services and a dozen protocols, including the NetBIOS
NetBIOS
NetBIOS is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System. It provides services related to the session layer of the OSI model allowing applications on separate computers to communicate over a local area network. As strictly an API, NetBIOS is not a networking protocol...

 over TCP/IP (NBT), SMB, CIFS (an enhanced version of SMB), DCE/RPC
DCE/RPC
DCE/RPC, short for "Distributed Computing Environment / Remote Procedure Calls", is the remote procedure call system developed for the Distributed Computing Environment...

 or more specifically, MSRPC
MSRPC
Microsoft RPC is a modified version of DCE/RPC. Additions include support for Unicode strings, implicit handles, inheritance of interfaces , and complex calculations in the variable-length string and structure paradigms already present in DCE/RPC.- Example :The DCE 1.0 reference implementation...

, the Network Neighborhood suite of protocols, a WINS
Windows Internet Naming Service
Windows Internet Name Service is Microsoft's implementation of NetBIOS Name Service , a name server and service for NetBIOS computer names. Effectively WINS is to NetBIOS names what DNS is to domain names — a central mapping of host names to network addresses...

 server also known as a NetBIOS Name Server (NBNS), the NT Domain suite of protocols which includes NT Domain Logons, Secure Accounts Manager (SAM) database, Local Security Authority (LSA) service, NT-style printing service (SPOOLSS), NTLM
NTLM
In a Windows network, NTLM is a suite of Microsoft security protocols that provides authentication, integrity, and confidentiality to users....

 and more recently Active Directory Logon which involves a modified version of Kerberos and a modified version of LDAP
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is an application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed directory information services over an Internet Protocol network...

. All these services and protocols are frequently incorrectly referred to as just NetBIOS or SMB. The NetBIOS and WINS protocols are deprecated on Windows.

Samba sets up network shares for chosen Unix directories
Directory (file systems)
In computing, a folder, directory, catalog, or drawer, is a virtual container originally derived from an earlier Object-oriented programming concept by the same name within a digital file system, in which groups of computer files and other folders can be kept and organized.A typical file system may...

 (including all contained subdirectories). These appear to Microsoft Windows users as normal Windows folders accessible via the network. Unix users can either mount
Mount (computing)
Mounting takes place before a computer can use any kind of storage device . The user or their operating system must make it accessible through the computer's file system. A user can access only files on mounted media.- Mount point :A mount point is a physical location in the partition used as a...

 the shares directly as part of their file structure using the smbmount
Smbmount
The program smbmount is used to mount a network drive, using the Server Message Block network protocol. It is a part of the open-source Samba suite. smbmount is identical in functionality as using mount -t smbfs...

 command or, alternatively, can use a utility, smbclient (libsmb) installed with Samba to read the shares with a similar interface to a standard command line FTP
File Transfer Protocol
File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...

 program. Each directory can have different access privileges overlaid on top of the normal Unix file protections. For example: home directories would have read/write access for all known users, allowing each to access their own files. However they would still not have access to the files of others unless that permission would normally exist. Note that the netlogon share, typically distributed as a read only share from /etc/samba/netlogon, is the logon directory for user logon scripts.

Samba services are implemented as two daemons:
  • smbd, which provides the file and printer sharing services, and
  • nmbd, which provides the NetBIOS-to-IP-address name service. NetBIOS over TCP/IP requires some method for mapping NetBIOS computer names to the IP addresses of a TCP/IP network.


Samba configuration is achieved by editing a single file (typically installed as /etc/smb.conf or /etc/samba/smb.conf). Samba can also provide user logon scripts and group policy implementation through poledit.

Samba is included in most Linux distributions and is started during the boot process. On Red Hat, for instance, the /etc/rc.d/init.d/smb script runs at boot time, and starts both daemons. Samba is not included in Solaris 8, but a Solaris 8-compatible version is available from the Samba website.

Samba includes a web administration tool called Samba Web Administration Tool (SWAT).

Samba TNG

Samba TNG (The Next Generation) was forked
Fork (software development)
In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a legal copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software...

 in late 1999, after disagreements between the Samba Team leaders and Luke Leighton about the directions of the Samba project. They failed to come to an agreement on a development transition path which allowed the research version of Samba he was developing (known at the time as Samba-NTDOM) to slowly be integrated into Samba.

Since the project started, development has been minimal due to a lack of developers. As such the Samba TNG team frequently recommends to people who are unsure of which program to use to try Samba instead, as they have more developers and are able to support more platforms and situations.

One of the key goals of the Samba TNG project is to rewrite all of the NT Domains services as FreeDCE
FreeDCE
FreeDCE is The Open Group's reference implementation of DCE/RPC 1.1 updated to be interoperable with free software development practices. FreeDCE is Distributed Computing Environment/Remote Procedure Calls 1.1 reworked, and it includes an up-to-date implementation of DCEThreads that actually works...

 projects. Making this rewriting goal difficult is the fact that services were all developed manually through network reverse-engineering, with limited or no reference to DCE/RPC documentation.

The key differences between the two programs are in the implementation of the NT Domains suite of protocols and MSRPC
MSRPC
Microsoft RPC is a modified version of DCE/RPC. Additions include support for Unicode strings, implicit handles, inheritance of interfaces , and complex calculations in the variable-length string and structure paradigms already present in DCE/RPC.- Example :The DCE 1.0 reference implementation...

 services. Samba makes all the NT Domains services available from a single place, whereas Samba TNG has separated each service into its own program.

ReactOS
ReactOS
ReactOS is an open source computer operating system intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows NT versions 5.x and up...

 has started using Samba TNG services for its SMB implementation. The developers of both projects were interested in seeing the Samba TNG design used to help get ReactOS talking to Windows networks. They have been working together to adapt the network code and build system. The multi-layered and modular approach made it easy to port each service to ReactOS.

See also

  • LM hash
    LM hash
    LM hash, LanMan, or LAN Manager hash was the primary hash that Microsoft LAN Manager and Microsoft Windows versions prior to Windows NT used to store user passwords...

  • Kerberos (protocol)
  • Smbldap-tools
  • SSLBridge
    SSLBridge
    SSLBridge is a light-weight and easy-to-use web-based interface to give employees access to a company network using Samba.With SSLBridge, access can be granted to a network from any computer that is connected to the Internet...

  • Smbmount
    Smbmount
    The program smbmount is used to mount a network drive, using the Server Message Block network protocol. It is a part of the open-source Samba suite. smbmount is identical in functionality as using mount -t smbfs...


External links

  • Official websites:
  • Other:
    • Samba-3 by Example, book licensed under the OPL
      Open Publication License
      Open Publication License is a license open publications created by the Open Content Project, which now recommends using one of the Creative Commons licenses....

    • A history of Samba, written in 1994, by Andrew Tridgell
    • Samba-TNG project homepage
    • Coverage on the Samba code fork from ZDNet
      ZDNet
      ZDNet is a business technology news website published by CBS Interactive, along with TechRepublic and SmartPlanet. The brand was founded on April 1, 1991 as a general interest technology portal from Ziff Davis and evolved into an enterprise IT-focused online publication owned by CNET...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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