T11PM   Configuring Samba: Avoiding Pitfalls 
John Blair, Cobalt Microserver

Who should attend: Administrators of heterogeneous environments consisting of Windows and UNIX hosts.

The freely distributed Samba software suite has become a popular tool for providing Windows (SMB) networking services from hosts running UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. Samba allows organizations to use existing UNIX hosts or inexpensive servers running one of the free UNIX-like operating systems to provide networking services to PCs running Windows 95, Windows NT, and OS/2. In other words, Samba allows Windows machines to "see" UNIX hosts on their networks, including the Internet. In many situations, Samba running on a free operating system like Linux or FreeBSD is an inexpensive alternative to running Windows NT Server. In other environments, Samba is an invaluable tool for providing convenient access to existing UNIX servers from PCs.

Because the problems that it tackles are complex, configuring Samba is often difficult. You will learn how to avoid simple to complex configuration problems. Examples of topics that will be covered are:

	General system architecture
	Dealing with problems caused by the differences between the UNIX and Windows filesystems
	Using Samba to process logins from Windows NT and Windows 95 machines.
	Smoothly integrating a Samba server into a large Windows network containing multiple NT domains and spanning more than one TCP/IP subnet.

People who attend this tutorial will leave with a thorough understanding of Samba and its components, as well as a toolbox of solutions to frequently encountered problems.