Samba is an implementation of dozens of services and a dozen protocols, including NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NBT), SMB, CIFS (an enhanced version of SMB), DCE/RPC or more specifically, MSRPC, the Network Neighborhood suite of protocols, a WINS server also known as a NetBIOS Name Server (NBNS), the NT Domain suite of protocols which includes NT Domain Logons, Secure Accounts Manager (SAM) database, Local Security Authority (LSA) service, NT-style printing service (SPOOLSS), NTLM and more recently Active Directory Logon which involves a modified version of Kerberos and a modified version of LDAP. All these services and protocols are frequently incorrectly referred to as just NetBIOS or SMB. Samba can see and share printers.

Samba configures network shares for chosen UNIX directories (including all contained subdirectories). These appear to Microsoft Windows users as normal Windows folders accessible via the network. UNIX users can either mount the shares directly as part of their file structure or, alternatively, can use a utility, smbclient (libsmb) installed with Samba to read the shares with a similar interface to a standard command line FTP program. Each directory can have different access privileges overlaid on top of the normal UNIX file protections. For example: home directories would have read/write access for all known users, allowing each to access their own files. However they would still not have access to the files of others unless that permission would normally exist. Note that the netlogon share, typically distributed as a read only share from /etc/samba/netlogon, is the logon directory for user logon scripts.

Samba Listener

The Samba listener uses Samba protocol components to poll the specified mapped network drive folder.

The open source jcifs-1.2.24 release is used to access the mapped network drives. The Samba listener behaves similar to an iWay File listener. The main difference is that the Samba listener reads messages from a mapped network drive instead of a local file system. The Samba listener accepts a UNC path as input and allows the user to specify a user ID, password, and domain information as required.

Samba Emitter

The Samba emitter emits messages to a mapped Windows drive using the Samba protocol.

The open source jcifs-1.2.24 release is used to access the mapped network drives. The Samba emitter behaves similar to an iWay File emitter. The main difference is that the Samba emitter emits messages to a mapped network drive instead of a local file system. The Samba emitter accepts a UNC path as input and allows the user to specify a user ID, password, and domain information as required.