samba

This Brazilian dance was first introduced in 1917 but was finally adopted by Brazilian society in 1930 as a ballroom dance. It is sometimes referred to as a Samba-Carioca, a Baion or a Batucado. The difference is mostly in the tempo played since the steps in all three dance are very similar. The style is to bounce steadily and smoothly in 2/4 meter. They say that the Samba was introduced in the United States in 1939 by the late Carmen Miranda.

http://www.iversonsoftware.com/dance/dance-s.html

Samba is a server module and an open source CIFS (Common Internet File System) implementation created by Aussie Andrew Tridgell. Its two key programs are smbd and nmbd, which implement the four basic CIFS services:

File & print services (provided by smbd)
Authentication and Authorization (handled w/ an authentication server called a Domain Controller)
Name resolution (two types: broadcast and point-to-point. Handled by nmbd)
Service announcement (browsing) (a browsable list of services handled by nmbd)

Note: BSD systems can use smbclient to access files with samba, but using it to access other disks as easily as with NFS would require an smbfs kernel module (for Linux).

Very few articles on Samba tell you how to do anything simple with it quickly, and this can be very frustrating to the new user.

Let's assume you are running linux on a workstation on a LAN with a bunch of windows machines, and you want to access the files in network neighborhood. Most distributions of linux come with samba installed but you have no idea how to use it.

The following command:

smbclient -L fred -U jim%mypassword

Will attempt to get a list of disk and print shares on the machine "fred." In the above command, "-L" stands for "list", and "-U" for "user." The -U option allows you to specify which username and password to use. You don't even need to have /etc/smb.conf on your system for this to work, let alone have smbd or nmbd running (the 2 Samba protocol daemons that allow you to serve disk shares to others on the network).

The next most interesting command is this:

smbclient //fred/dir1 -U jim%mypassword

This attempts to make a connection to the disk share dir1 on machine fred for user jim with password "mypassword." If it works, you will be sitting at a command prompt from which ftp like commands work (including "ls", "get file", and "put file").

Again, this works without even having the smb.conf file anywhere on your system, let alone properly configured.