Windows 3.11, 9x, Me, and NT—including Windows 2000, which is an updated release of Windows NT—have built-in support for the SMB protocol, so systems running these operating systems can easily access your Samba server’s resources. Under Windows 9x/NT, you can access Samba resources by using the Windows Explorer. Log on using a user account that’s authorized to access Samba resources, then click Network Neighborhood, and you should see a subtree that corresponds to your workgroup. Click that subtree, and you should see a subtree that corresponds to your Samba server. By expanding the subtree, you can see the browseable file and printer shares that are available. You can easily drag and drop files to and from a shared directory, assuming your user account is permitted the necessary access.

To use a shared printer, click Start → Settings → Printers and then double-click Add Printer. The wizard will guide you through the setup procedure. Simply choose the Network Printer option and browse to select the desired printer. If you configured the printer share without the browseable option, you cannot browse and therefore must type the name of the printer share. To do so, type two backward slashes, followed by the name of your Samba server, followed by a single backslash, followed by the name of the printer share. For example, if you want to access a printer share named lp on the Samba server known as SERVER, you’d type \SERVERlp.

You can map a file share to a drive letter by using the Tools → Map Network Drive menu item of the Windows Explorer. Simply select an available drive letter and type the name of the file share, which consists of two backward slashes, followed by the name of your Samba server, followed by a single backslash, followed by the name of the file share. For example, if you want to access a file share named db on the Samba server known as SERVER, you’d type \SERVERdb.

If you have difficulty connecting to your Samba server, follow the procedure given in the preceding section on troubleshooting.

The Samba package includes a simple SMB client that can access your Samba server and other SMB servers accessible to your system. To demonstrate that your client and server are working, log on using a user account that has Samba authorization and issue the following command:

               smbclient -L localhost

You should see a list of the browseable shares available on your server. To query a different SMB server, issue the following command:

               smbclient -L 
               server

where server is the name of the SMB server you want to contact. Rather than logging on using an authorized user account, you can explicitly specify a user account by using this command form:

               smbclient -L 
               server 
               -U 
               userid

To actually access resources via SMB, use the following command form:

               smbclient 
               service 
               -U 
               userid

where service specifies the name of the SMB host and share and userid specifies the user account to be used. The name of the SMB host should be preceded by two backward slashes and followed by one backward slash, for example:

               smbclient \servermyshare -U mccartyb

If the SMB server accepts your request, the client displays a special prompt:

smb: dir>

where dir indicates the current working directory on the SMB server. To download a file from the server, issue the command:

               get 
               file

where file specifies the name of the file to be downloaded. To upload a file to the server, issue the command:

               put 
               file

where file specifies the name of the file. To list the contents of the current directory, issue the command:

               dir

To enter a subdirectory, issue the following command, where dir specifies the name of the subdirectory:

               cd 
               dir

You can return to the parent directory by issuing the command:

               cd ..

To exit the SMB client, issue the command exit. You can obtain a list of commands by issuing the command help or obtain help on a particular command by issuing the command:

               help 
               command:

where command specifies the command that you need help with.

If SWAT fails to suit your taste, several other utilities are available:

You can use the smbprint script included in the Samba package to print Linux files by using a printer share. However, you’ll probably have to do some tweaking of configuration files and adjusting of shell scripts to get smbprint to work.

One of the more practical uses of the Linux SMB client is creating backup copies of files stored on a Windows system. To do so, simply share the drive or directory containing the files you want to back up. Using the Windows Explorer, right-click the drive or directory, click Properties, click the Sharing tab, and select the desired share options. Then, access the share from Linux using smbclient. Once you have the SMB prompt, move to the directory you want to back up and issue the SMB tar command:

smb: > tar c backup.tar

The syntax of the SMB tar command resembles that of the tar command, though it supports only a handful of options. When you issue the SMB tar command with the c option, the files of the current directory and all its subdirectories will be backed up and stored in the file backup.tar on your Linux system. Of course, you can specify a filename other than backup.tar if you wish (although the .tar extension is required). Once you’ve created the backup file, you can write it to a tape, a writable CD-ROM, or other media. If your backup requirements are meager, it may be sufficient merely to have a copy of the file on both your Windows and Linux systems.

To restore a backup, move to the directory where you want the files restored and issue the SMB tar command:

smb: > tar x backup.tar

The SMB client restores each file from the backup.tar file. Of course, you must have write access to the shared directory in order to be able to restore files.