Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 577 — #603

Heterogenous Networks

Samba uses the SMB protocol (server message block) that is based on the

NetBIOS services. Due to pressure from IBM, Microsoft released the proto-

col so other software manufacturers could establish connections to a Mi-

crosoft domain network. With Samba, the SMB protocol works on top

of the TCP/IP protocol, so the TCP/IP protocol must be installed on all

clients.

NetBIOS

Note

S/390, zSeries: NetBIOS Support

IBM S/390 and zSeries merely support SMB over TCP/IP. Net-

BIOS support is not available on these systems.

Note

NetBIOS is a software interface (API) designed for communication be-

tween machines. Here, a name service is provided. It enables machines

connected to the net to reserve names for themselves. After reservation,

these machines can be addressed by name. There is no central process that

checks names. Any machine on the network can reserve as many names

as it wants, if the names are not already in use. The NetBIOS interface can

now be implemented for different network architectures. An implemen-

tation that works relatively closely with network hardware is called Net-

BEUI, but this is often referred to as NetBIOS. Network protocols imple-

mented with NetBIOS are IPX from Novell™ (NetBIOS via TCP/IP) and

TCP/IP.

The NetBIOS names sent via TCP/IP have nothing in common with the

names used in /etc/hosts or those deﬁned by DNS. NetBIOS uses its

own, completely independent naming convention. However, it is recom-

mended to use names that correspond to DNS host names to make admin-

istration easier. This is the default used by Samba.

Clients

All common operating systems, such as Mac OS X, Windows, and OS/2,

support the SMB protocol. The TCP/IP protocol must be installed on all

computers. Samba provides a client for the different UNIX ﬂavors. For

Linux, there is a kernel module for SMB that allows the integration of SMB

resources on the Linux system level.

577SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server