Description of the SMB Protocol
The SMB protocol is an application-level network protocol that is primarily used forsharing printers, access to files, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes onthe network. Mainly used by Windows systems, SMB is an authenticated inter-process communicationmechanism. In the Oracle Solaris OS, the SMB protocol is used primarily forsharing printers. All of these processes take place over the network. SMB canrun over multiple protocols.
SMB works through a peer-to-peer approach. A client makes a specific requests toa server, and the server responds accordingly. SMB servers make their file systemsand other resources available to clients on the network. In the Oracle SolarisOS, SMB includes Samba server-side support that is managed by the Service ManagementFacility (SMF) and Samba smbclient client-side support. To access a Windows hosted printer,setup of a local print queue is required. This requirement is due todifferences in UNIX and Windows printing models.
What Is Samba?
Samba is an open-source SMB server freeware application that uses the SMB protocol.Samba provides Windows clients access to UNIX servers and UNIX clients access toWindows servers. The access that is provided is for both files and otherservices, including printer sharing. Samba's design, as well as constraint, is to operateon top of a variety of existing UNIX systems. Samba runs as aset of daemons and services, without any need for modification of existing kernels.More information about Samba can be found at http://www.samba.org.
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