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1. Samba-3 By Example 2nd Ed.

Practical Exercises to Successful Deployment

1.1 4/5 Recommended for the Experienced User

John H. Terpstra
2006, John H. Terpstra, ISBN 0-13-188221-X
$44.99 USD

1.2  Overview

This is the 2nd Edition to an already very good book. Enough changes have happened in Samba 3 that could not be covered in the 1st Edition. This is a timely and welcome update. By the way, the techniques used in publishing these books makes it possible to rapidly get new books out while the technology is still relevant. This book, for example, covers 3.0.20 and later of Samba. The latest version of Samba 3 as of this writing is 3.0.20b. That's incredible. My compliments to the contemporary editing techniques used on these books. Everyone doing technical publishing should switch!

This book attempts to simulate real life examples with fictitious companies and scenarios to demonstrate how to configure Samba. Well... at least for the first part of the book anyhow. The rest is devoted to information that will help you further with configuration and troubleshooting.

1.3  Welcome to Abmas!

Abmas, the fictitious company in the examples, slowly matures and changes and faces challenges that involve Unix/Linux and Windows. It start off with a basic configuration that might work at a very small company or at home. Then it moves to a small-medium sized business example and finally, to a more complex scenario. The problem: Not every scenario is covered. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there are just so many variations that it would be difficult to cover everything.

1.4  Outside Reading Required

Samba by Example is not a complete text. What I mean is that some of the information in the book, for example LDAP, will require information and experience outside of this book. Again, that might not be a bad thing... but perhaps a bit frustrating for the beginner and even intermediate user.

1.5  What I Liked

I like the example format. It makes the reading fun. Also, the question/answer section at the end of the chapters a fun... but perhaps a bit contrived. The Q&A is useful, just not what you might expect if you thought of this book as a potential textbook. I like the two part nature of the book where it leaves the example scenarios and moves into information that is useful for troubleshooting.

1.6  What I Didn't Like

Book simply doesn't cover some complex matters even when the chapters are totally dependent on those technologies. To fix this would mean increasing the size of this text dramatically. Maybe that's the wrong answer. I don't know.

I also don't like the fact that most of the scenarios take a pro-Samba position. There are a few cases where it it mentioned that Windows is already present in a Domain role, but most of the time, it is assumed that Samba is king of the network. Again, this isn't a bad idea... just not found in a typical workplace. For example, I live on a mature NIS infrastructure. We use Samba-3 to authenticate, but we map the users between Windows and NIS. Certainly Microsoft does provide a way of letting Microsoft control a NIS domain, but that's pretty silly when you think about it. Anyhow, for me, it lacked specific scenarios that are closer to my own situation.

1.7  Conclusion

This is a great book! If you are just getting started, especially in a situation where Microsoft Domains are not employed yet, this book is invaluable! Because some required concepts are not covered adequately, I do recommend this more for an experienced administrator (especially with LDAP experience) that is somewhat new to Samba or implementing a new Samba installation. Back to Review View Today