file systems

This book is a great resource for anyone who is using Samba to connect MS-Windows machines into a Unix environment for file sharing and print serving.

I cannot say that I have read the book in its entirety, but I have used it to troubleshoot some common mistakes in the configuration of my smb.conf file. Moreover it was useful in defining a simple batch file to manually re-connect my shares without having Windows re-build the connection at login.

I foresee myself consulting this book as my needs expand in usage of Samba as a networking bridge between Windows and the greater world that computing has to offer.

For a number of reasons: First, it's very good. It provides what you need to properly implement Samba in a variety of situations. It also provides the complete set of entries for smb.conf, something very very difficult to determine from looking at a man page.

Second, to support Samba. The 3.x version allows for the full replacement of NT Domains with a linux (open source)-based solution. It provides an excellent alternative to Microsoft.

Samba is fairly simple at its basic configuration. When things start getting large and complex is when this book really shines. The authors give examples and scenarios of small simple configs and works their way up to very complex configs. Consider who the authors are and you can only expect the best.