Install Samba under FreeBSD

The software for implementing the SMB/CIFS protocol under FreeBSD is samba──, a well-known free software that can run on many UNIX systems, making UNIX a LAN Manager server that provides file and print services to Windows clients. The current version of Samba is 2.0 and can be installed by packages collection or ports collection under FreeBSD.

Samba's homepage is http://samba.org, including resources for a large number of samba.

Although the SMB protocol is primarily used for Microsoft networks, the presence of samba is irrelevant. It is the author of Andrew Tridgell's attempt to complete the DEC Pathworks function on a sun workstation to complete his other research work. Pathworks is another SMB-based server. Andrew Tridgell knew nothing about SMB and NetBIOS at the time, but by analyzing the DOS client and Pathworks behavior, he completed the original version of Samba. Since then, as more and more people join the development of samba, Microsft also exposes SMB documentation and samba is getting better. Users of Samba typically use other SMB servers, such as Windows NT, and, based on their experience, the performance of the Samba server is more than that of other SMB servers, including Windows NT.

The main components of the Samba software are:

SMBD: This is the SMB server for Samba, which uses the SMB protocol to connect with customers to complete the de facto user authentication, rights management, and file sharing tasks;

NMBD: Provides a daemon for NetBIOS name services that can help customers locate servers and domains, as WINS servers on Windows NT;

Smb.conf: Is the configuration file for Samba, which is placed in the/USR/LOCAL/ETC directory in FreeBSD.

SWAT: is a samba-specific WWW server that is used to configure Samba through the client browser, providing a graphical configuration interface to samba;

Smbclient: is a simple SMB client that accesses files or print resources that are shared by other SMB computers, such as WINDOWS95 or NT computers, which operate like FTP.

Smbprint: A shell script that uses smbclient to send a document to be printed on a shared printer on a Windows computer.

Nmblookup: Command line tool for querying NetBIOS names.

Installing Samba

When Samba is installed using Packages collection, a startup script is automatically installed samba.sh.sample to/usr/local/etc/ RC.D directory, you can rename it to samba.sh to automatically start the Samba server smbd and NMBD when the computer starts. To start Samba, however, you also need to change the profile smb.conf in the/usr/local/etc/directory, and setup will automatically install a sample file smb.conf.default that you can copy as smb.conf file and then modify it.

# pkg_add samab-2.0.2.tgz
# cd /usr/local/etc
# cp smb.conf.default smb.conf
# cd rc.d
# cp samba.sh.sample samba.sh
# sh samba.sh
Samba

In order to use Samba normally, you must configure the smb.conf, edit the configuration file directly, or use the graphical settings interface to set it up. Because Samba is a very popular SMB server, there are a variety of graphical interface configuration programs, samba2.0 itself provides the SWAT is one of them, it as a Web server, can be configured through the WWW browser smb.conf. However, even though it can be set through the graphical interface, manual editing of smb.conf is still the most basic setup method.