Emphasis on new features

A few years ago, Samba came on the scene as an effective and cheap [free!] way to get unix and Microsoft Windows machines on a common network to do file sharing. Very popular. In late 2003, the latest major revision was released, Samba 3. Now this text gives an independent and indepth evaluation of all its features.

My impression from this book is that if you're already using Samba 2 and just upgrade to 3, you can essentially do all your existing procedures unchanged. Apart from bug fixes, of course, Samba 3 is, to good approximation, a superset of Samba 2. Makes the transition easier. This does mean that if you are using Samba 2, and have a text for it, and you upgrade, you may not really need this book.

Ah, but when it comes to specifically new features, then the book shines. Smith goes into sometimes excrutiating details about items like improved Unicode handling and Active Directory integration. He points out the useful features; the details of which can be nontrivial, and which form the key sections of the narrative.

All this is pitched to someone [you] that he assumes to be a unix sysadmin who has at least several months experience. Don't be intimidated by the length of the text. Sections are usable on an as-needed basis. In other words, you don't have to plough through all or even most of it, before you can start doing useful activities with Samba 3.

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