from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Samba
smbclient
smblib
<networking> A free suite of programs which implement the
{Server Message Block} (SMB) protocol.
Originally developed for {Unix} by Andrew Tridgell at the
{Australian National University}, the Samba {server} allows
files and printers on the {host} {operating system} to be
shared with {clients} such as {Windows for Workgroups}, {DOS},
{OS/2}, {Windows NT} and others.
For example, instead of using {telnet} to log in to a Unix
machine to edit a file there, a {Windows 95} user might
connect a drive in the Windows {Explorer} to a Samba server on
the Unix machine and edit the file in a Windows editor.
A Unix client called smbclient, built from the same {source
code}, allows {ftp}-like access to SMB resources.
Samba is available for many Unix variants, OS/2, and {VMS}.
Porting to {Novell Netware} is in progress (August 1996).
smblib is a {portable} generic library for making SMB calls
for implementing {client/server} functions from within any
program. {Linux} implements a complete file system (based on
smbclient) so by default Linux users have full access to
resources on {LAN Server}, Windows NT and {LAN Manager}
networks.
(http://samba.org/samba/samba.html).
(1998-11-22)