Samba (networking) A free suite of programs which implement the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.
Originally developed for Unix by Andrew Tridgell at the Australian National University, the Samba server allows files and printers on the host operating system to be shared with clients such as Windows for Workgroups, DOS, OS/2, Windows NT and others. For example, instead of using telnet to log in to a Unix machine to edit a file there, a Windows 95 user might connect a drive in the Windows Explorer to a Samba server on the Unix machine and edit the file in a Windows editor. A Unix client called smbclient, built from the same source code, allows ftp-like access to SMB resources. Samba is available for many Unix variants, OS/2, and VMS. Porting to Novell Netware is in progress (August 1996). smblib is a portable generic library for making SMB calls for implementing client/server functions from within any program. Linux implements a complete file system (based on smbclient) so by default Linux users have full access to resources on LAN Server, Windows NT and LAN Manager networks. http://samba.org/samba/samba.html. Last updated: 1998-11-22
