1. Introduction

This is the SMB HOWTO. This document describes how to use the Session Message Block (SMB) protocol, also called the NetBIOS or LanManager protocol, with Linux.

This document is maintained by David Wood ( dwood@plugged.net.au). Additions, modifications or corrections may be mailed there for inclusion in the next release.

The SMB protocol is used by Microsoft Windows 3.11, NT and 95 to share disks and printers. Using the Samba suite of tools by Andrew Tridgell, UNIX (including Linux) machines can share disk and printers with Windows hosts.

There are four things that one can do with Samba:

1. Share a linux drive with Windows machines.
2. Share a Windows drive with linux machines.
3. Share a linux printer with Windows machines.
4. Share a Windows printer with linux machines.

All of these are covered in this document.

Disclaimer: The procedures and scripts either work for the author or have been reported to work by the people that provided them. Different configurations may not work with the information given here. If you encounter such a situation, you may e-mail the author with suggestions for improvement in this document, but the author guarantees nothing. What did you expect? The author is, after all, a consultant...