This is version 1.8 of Samba, the free SMB client and server for unix. >>>> Please read THE WHOLE of this file as it gives important information >>>> about the configuration and use of Samba. 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). CONTRIBUTIONS ============= If you want to contribute to the development of the software then please join the mailing list. I accept patches (preferably in unified diff format) and am always glad to receive feedback or suggestions. You could also send hardware/software/money/jewelry or pizza vouchers directly to me. The pizza vouchers would be especially welcome :-) If you like the documentation or the smb.conf configuration file format then you should mail Karl.Auer@anu.edu.au to say thanks. 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 something else. Andrew Tridgell Andrew.Tridgell@anu.edu.au 3 Ballow Crescent Macgregor, A.C.T. 2615 Australia MORE INFO ========= DOCUMENTATION ------------- There is quite a bit of documentation included with the package, including man pages, and lots of .txt files with hints and useful info. FTP SITE -------- The main anonymous ftp distribution site for this software is nimbus.anu.edu.au in the directory pub/tridge/samba/. MAILING LIST ------------ There is a mailing list for discussion of Samba. To subscribe send mail to listproc@listproc.anu.edu.au with a body of "subscribe samba Your Name" To send mail to everyone on the list mail to samba@listproc.anu.edu.au There is also an announcement mailing list where I announce new versions. To subscribe send mail to listproc@listproc.anu.edu.au with a body of "subscribe samba-announce Your Name". All announcements also go to the samba 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). WEB SITE -------- A Samba WWW site has been setup with lots of useful info. Connect to: http://lake.canberra.edu.au/pub/samba/ It is maintained by Paul Blackman (thanks Paul!). You can contact him at ictinus@lake.canberra.edu.au. NOTE ABOUT PASSWORDS ==================== Unix systems use a wide variety of methods for checking the validity of a password. This is primarily controlled with the Makefile defines mentioned in the Makefile. Also note that some clients (notably WfWg) uppercase the password before sending it. The server tries the password as it receives it and also after lowercasing it. The Samba server can also be configured to try different upper/lowercase combinations. This is controlled by the [global] parameter "password level". A level of N means to try all combinations up to N uppercase characters in the password. A high value can chew a fair bit of CPU time and can lower the security of your system. Do not use this options unless you really need it - the time taken for password checking can become so high that clients time out. If you do use the "password level" option then you might like to use -DUFC_CRYPT in your Makefile. On some machine this makes password checking _much_ faster. This is also useful if you use the @group syntax in the user= option. If your site uses AFS (the Andrew File System), you can use the AFS section in the Makefile. This will first attempt to authenticate a username and password to AFS. If that succeeds, then the associated AFS rights will be granted. Otherwise, the password checking routine falls back to whatever Unix password checking method you are using. Note that the AFS code is only written and tested for AFS 3.3 and later. SECURITY = SERVER ================= Samba can use a remote server to do it's username/password validation. This allows you to have one central machine (for example a NT box) control the passwords for the Unix box. See the section on "security =" in smb.conf(5) for details. NOTE ABOUT THE USER= OPTION =========================== Many people have been confused by the user= option in smb.conf. It is there to overcome client limitations in that some clients may not correctly supply a username for various reasons. This was mostly the case when people used the COREPLUS protocol, which is now unlikely. In most cases I expect people not to use a user= line at all. In fact, using a user= line can actually lower the security of your system as it means people trying to break in can try lots of accounts simultaneously. Note that a user= line does not specify what users may connect - it merely adds to the list of usernames that the Samba server checks against the incoming password to try and find a match, in addition to any usernames that may have been passed by the client. Only when used with the "only user=yes" option does it actually restrict who can connect. A much better way of restricting what users can connect is to use the "valid users=" and "invalid users=" lines to exactly specify what users (and groups of users) are allowed to connect. MAPPING USERNAMES ================= If you have different usernames on the PCs and the unix server then take a look at the "username map" option. See the smb.conf man page for details. NOTE ABOUT DEBUGLEVEL ===================== WARNING: A high debug level can severely damage your performance and can produce enourmous log files. In particular on AIX using a debuglevel above 1 produces a VERY slow server. I think this is because fflush() is very slow on AIX. In most cases a level of 1 or 2 is appropriate. BACKING UP PCs ============== Ricky Poulten (poultenr@logica.co.uk) has written a "tar" extension to smbclient that allows you to back up and restore your lan-manager compatible network using smbclient. You can fetch his extension from the "contributed" section on nimbus. The URL is ftp://nimbus.anu.edu.au/pub/tridge/samba/contributed/