Samba

Users expect to be able to share resources over a network, regardless of the OS used, and com- panies have discovered that users no longer tolerate proprietary systems that can’t co-exist in a network. To address the issue of interoperability, a group of programmers created Samba (www.samba.org) in 1992 as an open-source implementation of CIFS. With Samba, *nix ser- vers can share resources with Windows clients, and Windows clients can access a *nix resource without realizing that the resource is on a *nix computer. Samba has been ported to non-*nix systems, too, including OpenVMS, NetWare, and AmigaOS. At the time of this writing,

Samba contributors continue to analyze SMB2 so that it can be supported in the upcoming Samba 4. Security professionals should have a basic knowledge of SMB and Samba because many companies have a mixed environment of Windows and *nix systems.
For a Windows computer to be able to access a *nix resource, CIFS must be enabled on both systems. On networks that require *nix computers to access Windows resources, Samba is often used. It’s not a hacking tool; this product was designed to enable *nix computers to “trick” Windows services into believing that *nix resources are Windows resources. A *nix client can connect to a Windows shared printer and vice versa when Samba is configured on the *nix computer. Most new versions of Linux include Samba as an optional package, so you don’t need to download, install, and compile it.