Mac OS X And Samba?

PirateBek asks: "As Apple OS X is based on the Mach3 BSD kernel, does anyone know if it can natively (or be compiled to include) support Samba services? Nothing seems to be listed on the Apple site." If not, does anyone know if the Samba Team is planning any support?

It would be stupid of Apple not to

[Menthos]

This is not an answer to your question, but I think it would be horribly stupid of Apple, from a business point of view, not to support SMB filesharing via Samba. I mean, even Sun uses the efforts of the Samba team. Rumor says that creating anything like Samba and support the flawed SMB protocol was even too much for Sun to do.

And since Windows filesharing is an important factor at a lot of sites that uses both Mac and Windows boxes, a deciscion of not porting Samba would make no sense to me.

Samba is implemented entirely in user space

[alangmead]

Samba is implemented entirely is user space. Little depends on the kernel out side of TCP sockets and POSIX file system calls. (Compare this to some version of Netatalk which require AppleTalk support in the kernel)

I don't see any reason why it couldn't work. I'm waiting until they put their "beige mac installer" software on their web site before I download a copy. If this question is still up in the air by then, I'll build it and let you know any problems I run into.

Here You Go

[macbert]

http://www2.kenyon.edu/people/shankb/samba/ [kenyon.edu]

Apple may not be on the ball with SMB intergrated support but the admins understand the importance of keeping all of our users happy.

And all you MacOS X needs on http://www.stepwise.com/ [stepwise.com]