< 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.
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(1998-11-22)