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The Official Samba 3 HOWTO and Reference Guide began as a collection of on-line documents and HOWTOs available in PDF or HTML (in fact, they still are available from the SAMBA site) and have finally found there way into a convenient bound hard-copy. Weighing in at almost 700 pages, just about everything ever written or documented about SAMBA is in here and updated for version 3.
Included topics include:
The book also devotes chapters to essential but often-forgotten topics such as backup techniques, availability and SWAT (the SAMBA Web Administration Tool). There are also chapters on troubleshooting common problems and even one on how to submit a proper and useful bug report.
One of the greatest things about this book, though, is that includes a complete reference for the infamous smb.conf file. The appendix documents every available option (at the time of publication) giving example usage and the default value. This is a great feature, since the man(5) page only seems to list the available options, not define them.
Sure, most of the contents of this book are available for free on the web, but I'll have to say that having this hard-copy is convenient enough to merit carrying it around the office while I'm debugging our domain logons. I've found a few things that have turned out to be out of date (config file syntax) but they haven't been many. I feel the book is a little light on complete examples for given situation, but I'm looking forward to Terpstra's forthcoming book Samba 3 - By Example to fix that.
About the reviewer:
Josh Malone, has been a Unix Systems and Network Administrator for a company in Charlottesville, VA for three years. He attended Virginia Tech for four years in the Bradley Dept. Of Electrical and Computer Engineering before setting out to make his fame and fortune in the world of Unix Administration. While at Tech, he was a member and officer in the VT L/UUG and is now an active member in the CHUUG.