Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 11 - ADMINISTRATION Administration Manual page 348

the network, enabling groups of users to work together and share documents across
the network.
NetBIOS
NetBIOS is a software interface (API) designed for communication between ma-
chines providing a name service. It enables machines connected to the network 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 net-
work can reserve as many names as it wants as long as the names are not already
in use. The NetBIOS interface can be implemented for different network architec-
tures. An implementation that works relatively closely with network hardware is
called NetBEUI, 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 recommended to use names that
correspond to DNS hostnames to make administration easier or use DNS natively.
This is the default used by Samba.
Samba server
Samba server provides SMB/CIFS services and NetBIOS over IP naming services
to clients. For Linux, there are three daemons for Samba server: smnd for SMB/CIFS
services, nmbd for naming services, and winbind for authentication.
Samba client
The Samba client is a system that uses Samba services from a Samba server over
the SMB protocol. 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. You do not need to run any daemon for the Samba client.
Shares
SMB servers provide resources to the clients by means of shares. Shares are printers
and directories with their subdirectories on the server. It is exported by means of
a name and can be accessed by its name. The share name can be set to any name—it
does not have to be the name of the export directory. A printer is also assigned a
name. Clients can access the printer by its name.
334 Administration Guide