496 Part IV . Implementing Network Services in SUSE Linux section highlights the Samba-related packages that are available in your SUSE distribution and explains how to locate and install any that you might not have initially installed on your system. A Bit of Background The SUSE Linux kernel features built-in connectivity with networked Windows resources by supporting the Windows Server Message Block (SMB) protocol that underlies most native Windows networking mechanisms. The SMB protocol is now considered a part of Microsoft s more general Common Internet File Services (CIFS), but its name lives on in the Samba software suite. Acronyms reign supreme in the network world, most of which are related to the history of various standards and protocols. This is especially true for the long list of network protocols used by DOS and Windows systems. When Microsoft decided that network support was a good thing, it began entering the market by introducing the NetBIOS (Network Basic Input/Output System) standard in 1984 to define and control the characteristics of network communication from a DOS or Windows system. To implement this transport standard, Microsoft provided the NetBEUI (NetBIOS Extended User Interface) protocol. NetBEUI worked fine on the small corporate networks of the day but was missing basic features, such as routing, that were required as networks became larger and connection between distinct but connected networks became increasingly necessary. From 1985 through 1988, Microsoft worked with IBM and Intel to introduce and popularize SMB, which is a NetBIOS implementation that today runs over TCP/IP networks. If you re still collecting acronyms, SMB is the most common example of what is generically known as NBT (NetBIOS over TCP/IP, also known as NetBT). As discussed in Chapter 6, TCP/IP has always been the networking protocol associated with Unix and Linux systems. Samba was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell ( tridge ), who initially began development of what would later become Samba on DEC and Sun workstations in 1991. He began work on porting Samba (then just known as NetBIOS for Unix or smbserver) in 1992. In 1994, J.R. Conlin and Dave Fenwick started an SMB-related newsgroup, comp.protocols.smb, as a forum for discussing Samba development; smbserver was renamed Samba in 1994 because of conflicts with the name of an existing product, and the rest is history. Today, Samba is used on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and any Unix and Unix-like system that you can think of. Similarly, most of the NAS (Network Attached Storage) systems that you can purchase today support NFS (the Network File System, discussed in Chapter 22) thanks to Sun s early release of the NFS specification and Windows networking courtesy of Samba. SUSE Linux provides an up-to-date version of Samba Version 3. Version 3 introduces several significant enhancements over previous versions of Samba, including the following:
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