Using Samba

© May 2000 Tony Lawrence

Order (or just read more about) Using Samba- Eckstein. Collier-Brown & Kelly

This is the O'Reilly treatment of Samba, and it is also the book "Officially adopted by the Samba team". It includes a CDROM that has source and binaries for Samba 2.0.5a. This definitely is the best Samba book I've read yet. It is complete, it explains both the Windows and Unix aspects of SMB, and it includes detailed examples with appropriate diagrams and screen shots. The only possible complaint I could make is that 2.1 came out in time for references to get into the text- I wouldn't say these are confusing, and it's good that they were able to include such late breaking changes, but it's still just a little disconcerting.

Explaining how things work on the Windows side is very important, and this does a more than excellent job without making you feel like you are reading a Windows book- the tone of this is definitely Samba on Unix. There's an extensive trouble-shooting section and even sections on performance tuning and setting it up to use SSL.

I haven't yet installed Samba (I've been using Visionfs on SCO and just haven't had a need for it yet on Linux), and one of the reasons I've been putting it off is that the previous books I have looked at haven't left me feeling entirely prepared. After reading this, I feel much more confident.

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