Another free ebook from OReilly books publisher, ebook on Using Samba. Samba is an extremely useful networking tool for anyone who has both Windows and Unix systems on his network. Running on a Unix system, it allows Windows to share files and printers on the Unix host, and it also allows Unix users to access resources shared by Windows systems.
Although it might seem natural to use a Windows server to serve files and printers to a network containing Windows clients, there are good reasons for preferring a Samba server for this duty. Samba is reliable software that runs on reliable Unix operating systems, resulting in fewer problems and a low cost of maintenance. Samba also offers better performance under heavy loads, outperforming Windows 2000 Server by a factor of 2 to 1 on identical PC hardware, according to published third-party benchmarks. When common, inexpensive PC hardware fails to meet the demands of a huge client load, the Samba server can easily be moved to a proprietary "big iron" Unix mainframe, which can outperform Windows running on a PC many times. If all that weren't enough, Samba has a very nice cost advantage: it's free. Not only is the software itself freely available, but also no client licenses are required, and it runs on high-quality, free operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.
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