Samba (software)

Samba is a free software implementation of the SMBnetworkingprotocol, and was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell. Samba provides file and printservices for various Microsoft Windowsclients and can integrate with a Microsoft Windows Server domain, either as a Domain Controller (DC) or as a domain member. As of version 4, it also supports Active Directory domains, in addition to its traditional support for Microsoft Windows NT domains.

Samba runs on most Unix-like systems, such as Linux, Solaris, AIX and the BSD variants, including Apple macOS (Mac OS X 10.2 and greater) and macOS Server. Samba also runs on a number of other operating systems such as OpenVMS and IBM i. Samba is standard on nearly all distributions of Linux and is commonly included as a basic system service on other Unix-based operating systems as well. Samba is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The name Samba comes from SMB (Server Message Block), the name of the proprietary protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system.