-This is a development version of Samba, the free SMB and CIFS client and
-server for unix and other operating systems. Samba is maintained by
+This is a development version of Samba, the free SMB and CIFS client and
+server for UNIX and other operating systems. Samba is maintained by
the Samba Team, who support the original author, Andrew Tridgell.
>>>> Please read THE WHOLE of this file as it gives important information
>>>> about the configuration and use of Samba.
NOTE: Installation instructions may be found in
- docs/htmldocs/install.html
+ docs/htmldocs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/install.html
This software is freely distributable under the GNU public license, a
copy of which you should have received with this software (in a file
called COPYING).
-WHAT IS SMB?
-============
+WHAT IS SMB/CIFS?
+=================
This is a big question.
The very short answer is that it is the protocol by which a lot of
PC-related machines share files and printers and other information
such as lists of available files and printers. Operating systems that
-support this natively include Windows NT, OS/2, and Linux and add on
-packages that achieve the same thing are available for DOS, Windows,
-VMS, Unix of all kinds, MVS, and more. Apple Macs and some Web Browsers
-can speak this protocol as well. Alternatives to SMB include
-Netware, NFS, Appletalk, Banyan Vines, Decnet etc; many of these have
-advantages but none are both public specifications and widely
-implemented in desktop machines by default.
-
-The Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS) is what the new SMB initiative
+support this natively include Windows 9x, Windows NT (and derivatives),
+OS/2, Mac OS X and Linux. Add on packages that achieve the same
+thing are available for DOS, Windows 3.1, VMS, Unix of all kinds,
+MVS, and more. Some Web Browsers can speak this protocol as well
+(smb://). Alternatives to SMB include Netware, NFS, Appletalk,
+Banyan Vines, Decnet etc; many of these have advantages but none are
+both public specifications and widely implemented in desktop machines
+by default.
+
+The Common Internet File system (CIFS) is what the new SMB initiative
is called. For details watch http://samba.org/cifs.
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO USE SMB?
==============================
-1. Many people want to integrate their Microsoft or IBM style desktop
- machines with their Unix or VMS (etc) servers.
+1. Many people want to integrate their Microsoft desktop clients
+ with their Unix servers.
2. Others want to integrate their Microsoft (etc) servers with Unix
- or VMS (etc) servers. This is a different problem to integrating
- desktop clients.
+ servers. This is a different problem to integrating desktop
+ clients.
3. Others want to replace protocols like NFS, DecNet and Novell NCP,
especially when used with PCs.
WHAT CAN SAMBA DO?
==================
-Here is a very short list of what samba includes, and what it does. For
-many networks this can be simply summarised by "Samba provides a complete
-replacement for Windows NT, Warp, NFS or Netware servers."
+Please refer to the WHATSNEW.txt included with this README for
+a list of features in the latest Samba release.
+
+Here is a very short list of what samba includes, and what it does.
+For many networks this can be simply summarized by "Samba provides
+a complete replacement for Windows NT, Warp, NFS or Netware servers."
- a SMB server, to provide Windows NT and LAN Manager-style file and print
services to SMB clients such as Windows 95, Warp Server, smbfs and others.
+- a Windows NT 4.0 Domain Controller replacement.
+
+- a file/print server that can act as a member of a Windows NT 4.0
+ or Active Directory domain.
+
- a NetBIOS (rfc1001/1002) nameserver, which amongst other things gives
browsing support. Samba can be the master browser on your LAN if you wish.
- a ftp-like SMB client so you can access PC resources (disks and
-printers) from unix, Netware and other operating systems
+ printers) from UNIX, Netware, and other operating systems
- a tar extension to the client for backing up PCs
Related packages include:
-- smbfs, a linux-only filesystem allowing you to mount remote SMB
-filesystems from PCs on your linux box. This is included as standard with
+- smbfs, a Linux-only filesystem allowing you to mount remote SMB
+filesystems from PCs on your Linux box. This is included as standard with
Linux 2.0 and later.
-- tcpdump-smb, a extension to tcpdump to allow you to investigate SMB
-networking problems over netbeui and tcp/ip.
+- cifsvfs, a more advanced Linux-only filesystem allowing you to mount
+remote SMB filesystems from PCs on your Linux box. This is included
+as standard with Linux 2.5 and later.
-- smblib, a library of smb functions which are designed to make it
-easy to smb-ise any particular application. See
-ftp://samba.org/pub/samba/smblib.
CONTRIBUTIONS
If you want to contribute to the development of the software then
please join the mailing list. The Samba team accepts patches
-(preferably in "diff -u" format, see docs/BUGS.txt for more details)
-and are always glad to receive feedback or suggestions to the address
-samba@lists.samba.org.
+(preferably in "diff -u" format, see http://samba.org/samba/devel/
+for more details) and are always glad to receive feedback or
+suggestions to the address samba@lists.samba.org. More information
+on the various Samba mailing lists can be found at http://lists.samba.org/.
-You can also get the Samba sourcecode straight from the CVS tree - see
-http://samba.org/cvs.html.
+You can also get the Samba sourcecode straight from the Subversion tree - see
+http://samba.org/samba/subversion.html.
You could also send hardware/software/money/jewelry or pre-paid pizza
vouchers directly to Andrew. The pizza vouchers would be especially
welcome, in fact there is a special field in the survey for people who
have paid up their pizza :-)
-If you like a particular feature then look through the CVS change-log
-(on the web at http://samba.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/samba) and see
+If you like a particular feature then look through the Subversion change-log
+(on the web at http://websvn.samba.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi) and see
who added it, then send them an email.
Remember that free software of this kind lives or dies by the response
-we get. If noone tells us they like it then we'll probably move onto
+we get. If no one tells us they like it then we'll probably move onto
something else. However, as you can see from the user survey quite a lot of
people do seem to like it at the moment :-)
-------------
There is quite a bit of documentation included with the package,
-including man pages, and lots of .txt files with hints and useful
+including man pages, and lots of .html files with hints and useful
info. This is also available from the web page. There is a growing
-collection of information under docs/faq; by the next release expect
-this to be the default starting point.
+collection of information under docs/.
A list of Samba documentation in languages other than English is
available on the web page.
If you would like to help with the documentation (and we _need_ help!)
then have a look at the mailing list samba-docs, archived at
-http://lists.samba.org/
+http://lists.samba.org/listinfo/samba-docs/
MAILING LIST
NEWS GROUP
----------
-You might also like to look at the usenet news group
-comp.protocols.smb as it often contains lots of useful info and is
-frequented by lots of Samba users. The newsgroup was initially setup
-by people on the Samba mailing list. It is not, however, exclusive to
-Samba, it is a forum for discussing the SMB protocol (which Samba
-implements). The samba list is gatewayed to this newsgroup.
+You might also like to look at the usenet news group comp.protocols.smb
+as it often contains lots of useful info and is frequented by lots of
+Samba users. The newsgroup was initially setup by people on the Samba
+mailing list. It is not, however, exclusive to Samba, it is a forum for
+discussing the SMB protocol (which Samba implements). The samba list
+is gatewayed to this newsgroup.
WEB SITE
git.samba.org / ira / wip.git / blobdiff