Technical publisher O’Reilly & Associates has announced the release of Using Samba, Second Edition, with content aimed at Mac OS X users, along with Linux and Unix geeks, too.
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Samba is an open source implementation of the SMB file sharing protocol, and it’s one of the reasons why Mac OS X can easily interoperate with Windows products on computer networks.
Written by Jay Ts, Robert Eckstein and David Collier-Brown, the US$39.95 tome helps users of systems that run Samba to understand how to optimize their systems. The manual has been adopted by the Samba Team and is under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). The revised Second Edition offers informationa bout Samba 2.2 and covers 3.0, which was still in development as this volume went to print.
Co-author Jay Ts noted that Samba’s usefulness goes beyond just accessing Windows files — it’s also good for Unix to Unix communication. He said it’s fast and has a better security model than Network File System, or NFS, a popular client/server communications model developed by Sun.
“Considering that Samba now comes with Mac OS X, the result of all this is that Samba is becoming a ‘one source’ solution for networking all three of the major operating systems that will be in use a few years from now, that is, Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows,” added Ts.
The manual takes you through installation and configuration,a nd focuses on security, cross-platform compatibility, and other issue. It also examines the strengths and weaknesses present in Windows domains and in Samba itself. An entire chapter is even dedicated to troubleshooting.
Using Samba, Second Edition, ISBN 0-596-00256-4 is 539 pages. It costs US$39.95. A sample chapter and other content is available online.