Samba 3 By Example 195
| Samba 3 By Example: Practical Exercises to Successful Deployment | |
| author | John H. Terpstra |
| pages | 340 |
| publisher | Prentice Hall PTR |
| rating | 10 |
| reviewer | Joshua Malone |
| ISBN | 0131472216 |
| summary | Working examples to use Samba 3 in small or large office |
Samba 3 By Example begins on a very friendly note by explaining how to get the most out of it any what you'll need to complete the exercises in the rest of the book. The beginning also includes a Windows networking primer, complete with packet captures (using the popular tool 'ethereal') showing how network browsing really works, under the hood.
This book follows the evolution of a fictitious company, "Abmas", through an impossible growth from a 9-person office to a 2000-person network with multiple sites around the world. You assume the role of the IT guy: charged with growing the company's network infrastructure, planning for change and, above all, keeping the users happy.
Some of the major challenges tackled in this book are:
- Using Samba-3 as an NT-4 style PDC
- Using Samba-3 as an domain member server
- Using the various authentication backends as alternatives to the traditional 'smbpasswd' backend
- Using LDAP to implement a Samba-3 PDC with backup domain controllers
- Authentication using winbindd
- Migrating from NT-4 to Samba-3 for a PDC
- Using kerberos to integrate Samba-3 into a Microsoft Active Directory domain (as a domain member server)
I am extremely impressed by Terpstra's book. It addresses the complete spectrum of Samba deployments, from the 10-person office to the 2000-seat, multi-site enterprise while explaining not just what to do, but how to do it and, most importantly, why. The examples are practical and you can really imagine some poor sap^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H unfortunate systems administrator finding him/herself in these very positions. This book says that these scenarios are hypothetical aggregations of real-world situations, but could swear I've worked for this company before.
One of the nicest things about this book is that each situation is followed by a Q&A section - almost like a textbook - that addresses both the important points of the exercise, as well as some of the trivial details that were left out for the sake of brevity. Don't be tempted to skip them thinking that it's just a rehash.
It's worth noting that this book is not a replacement for TOSHARG and defers to it for technical details in multiple cases. These two books should be sidearms for any IT administrator that has to deal with Windows clients on a daily basis.
I'm also very impressed with Terpstra's candor about Samba's features, weaknesses and road map. Nowhere in this book is Windows put down as inferior or is Samba touted as the "be-all, end-all" of Desktop and client management solutions. The relative flexibility of Active Directory and Samba is discussed only briefly and the choice to use Samba over Windows is ultimately left to the reader. Since you've gone to the trouble of purchasing this book, Terpstra assumes you've already made up your mind and require no further convincing.
Continuing to be mindful of office politics, Terpstra devotes a section in each chapter to the political implications of replacing Windows with an open source product, and an entire chapter to the issues inherent in bringing Samba into a traditionally Windows-based shop. Even though he refers to this chapter as a "shameless self-promotion of Samba-3", I found it to be an even-handed discussion of the issues you will most likely encounter from anti-Unix advocates and IT managers who have bought into the anti-Linux FUD. These are real issues that Systems Administrators need to know how to deal with effectively but too many of us simply dismiss because we feel they are uninformed.
In addition to examples of Samba configuration, examples are provided to integrate Samba with other useful servers such as the squid web proxy, OpenLDAP, bind and dhcpd. The configuration files for Samba as well as these additional pieces of software are also conveniently located on the included CD-ROM, along with Samba 3.0.2 packages for Red Hat Fedora Core 1 and SuSE Linux (Enterprise server 8 for x86 and s390 and SuSE Linux 9).
I think my biggest complaint with this book is that the "case study"-like format of this book tends to lump a large number of new features into a single example. This can make it hard to isolate the particular feature that you're interested in.
For instance, the example that illustrates automatic printer driver downloads to Windows clients is lumped into a chapter that is primarily concerned with using LDAP to implement a BDC. Automatic driver installation is a great feature that many sites far too small to consider implementing LDAP would likely be interested in.
In all, though, I'm extremely pleased with Samba 3 by Example - perhaps even more than TOSHARG. In it, you'll find plenty of tips, working examples and honest admissions of bugs (and their workarounds) that will keep you from losing your sanity. You could almost call this book a 300 page Samba and Windows networking consultant with over 8 years of experience. Terpstra has been incredibly kind to the Samba community by imparting so much wisdom to us all in this book.
Josh Malone has been a FreeBSD and Windows system administrator for three and a half years working in development shops and hosting companies, and currently works as a Linux engineer for an embedded systems company. You can purchase Samba 3 By Example from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page
Kerberos Authentication (Score:5, Interesting)
excellent! i have been looking for this (Score:4, Interesting)
overall my impression is that in total i suppose you would need less time to set up and maintain a nice samba server than a w2k server, even if it is your first time installing linux.
with the help of this book it will become even simpler....
yay.
Re:Question: (Score:0, Interesting)
FACT 1. Windows is the better desktop.
FACT 2. Linux is the better server.
Samba makes the two work together.
"By Example" books a great idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Samba is one of those setups where the total amount of functionality is far more than many users need, so a collection of well-designed examples will greatly speed one's implementation (and reduce common security problems). Fortunately the default config file has improved in Samba to the point where it's not too difficult to setup basic printer/filesystem sharing.
These "cookbook" style books obviously can't replace a reference, but they often are more useful as a starting point. I've spent over five years on unix systems now, but I still groan at the lack of examples in the man pages of more obscure command line software. Google often comes through, provided I can think of a good phrase that describes what I'm trying to do ("search and replace with perl command line" - perl -pi -e 's/searchterm/replaceterm/g' [filenames], btw).
Great! (Score:1, Interesting)
adds stability to Win9x/ME workgroups (Score:5, Interesting)
Once I installed Samba on my main OpenBSD server, things quieted down. Took a few weeks before I realized: no Windows "hiccups" had happened! It's stayed that way for months now. I may have gotten the same effect by setting up a Windows PDC, but I don't have a "dedicated" box new enough to be useful for that. At this point, even if I don't need the shares, I'll leave it running just to stabilize the wife's WinME box!
a bit ot: C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 (Score:0, Interesting)
Anyone know when this will be released in PDF? I've thought about buying it blind, but not only would I really like to work with it a bit first, the places I typically shop from lists it as out of stock to boot (and has for some time. Not a big seller? I dunno).
(PS. Links to places which list the book as stocked will be totally unhelpful since you have no idea of where in the world I am or what currency/countries I prefer to deal with)
Samba Cryptic? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Samba Cryptic? (Score:2, Interesting)
Overall, I like it. Unlike NT, on a Dual PIII with 768Mb of memory and Ultra160 SCSI drives, Linux with Samba is faster, more stable, more secure (I think), easier to admin, and cheaper. I could not be happier. I now plan to set up more Linux boxen for other stuff on the network (mail, routing, etc.).
Samba vs. NFS (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:samba rocks - until you hit oplocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
Believe me, I've been banging my head against this for a couple of weeks now (I can't reproduce the problem, but other people on the network can and do, daily). Everyone seems to have their own idea about the correct combination of oplocks, level 2 oplocks, veto oplocks, deadtime etc to use; but nothing seems 100% foolproof. This is the reason we're probably going to be switching away from Samba to Win2k3. I don't want this, but as the only Linux guy, it's hard to fight the tide when you're having to clear down the locks and force people to close and re-open files almost daily as they're lock out of their own files...
Re:samba rocks - until you hit oplocks! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:samba rocks - until you hit oplocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know the specifics of your situation, so this very well may be an extremely bad idea for you, hence the "RTFM" comment.
The system these configuration entries came from is a server that hosts numerous files which many people read, but only one or two people need to write to (and only one of those on a regular basis).
The problem being that the annoying win32 program being used refuses to function unless it believes it has exclusive read and write access to the files, even though it never actually writes to the files (in most cases).
It¦s not an elegant solution, but it solved the problem here with no ill effects since it was installed over a year ago, but yes, it has huge potential to cause file corruption on a system where the same files are concurrently modified by multiple users.
Re:samba rocks - until you hit oplocks! (Score:2, Interesting)