If you walk into any company office today, you are likely to find Windows workstations on the desktop and Unix or Linux servers in the back office. Getting these machines to share authentication, storage, and printing resources has always been something of a challenge. The Samba open-source package has been developed to meet that challenge, and a number of organizations are now deploying it in production environments.

The recent release of Samba version 3.0 has spawned a whole new set of books about how to use it. This is one of them. It differs from the others in that it is constructed from Samba “how-to” documents, written by a number of enthusiasts. The editors have assembled these into sections, which lead the reader through installation, basic configuration, advanced configuration, and trouble-shooting. Readers are assumed to have some familiarity with Microsoft Windows network administration.

The first two chapters include some sample configuration files for several typical office resources. Among these are read-only document servers, file-and-print servers, and domain controllers.

Chapters 3 through 5 provide further details relating to security modes, domain control, and backup domain controllers. It is noted that replication of the “smbpasswd” file using rsync techniques over a secure shell (SSH) link can raise some issues; therefore, local directory access protocol (LDAP) authentication is regarded as more reliable.

Chapter 6, “Domain Membership,” illustrates how workstations can be added to a domain so that the potential benefits of single-sign-on security can be realized. Both manual and on-the-fly procedures for creation of machine trust accounts are covered. There is a short section on using Kerberos authentication with a Windows 2000 Active Directory Server.

Chapter 7 provides sample configuration files for a shared reference document server and a central print server where network logon services are not required. Chapter 8 contains a number of screen shots that illustrate how transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) and domain membership parameters can be set up on several currently supported Windows platforms.

Chapters 9 through 28 constitute the third part of the book, “Advanced Configurations.” Readers will need to select those topics that address their requirements. Those that best addressed my needs related to account information databases, shared access controls, and printer drivers.

Chapter 18 includes some 80 pages on the common Unix printing system (CUPS), and there are shorter chapters that address the password authentication module (PAM), unicode character sets, and high availability.

Towards the end of the book, there are chapters about migration, Web-based administration, non-Microsoft clients, and performance tuning. The book ends with a set of manual, or man, pages.

This is not an easy book to read; those who wrote the documents from which it has been assembled didn’t always have the big picture in mind, and there is some degree of repetition. You may find that the more consistent approach in a book like Using Samba [1] is more to your taste. However, if you are persistent, you will find in this book a level of detail that can’t be found elsewhere in any one place.