The name 'Samba' was derived by running the Unix command grep through the system dictionary looking for words that contained the letters S, M, and B, in that order (i.e. However, Tridgell got a trademark notice from the company 'Syntax', who sold a product named TotalNet Advanced Server and owned the trademark for 'SMBserver'.

Midway through the 1.5-series, the name was changed to smbserver. Also, at this time GPL2 was chosen as license. This release was the first to include client-software as well as a server. With a focus on interoperability with Microsoft's LAN Manager, Tridgell released 'netbios for unix', observer, version 1.5 in December 1993. It did not have a formal name at the time of the first releases, versions 0.1, 0.5, and 1.0, all from the first half of January 1992 Tridgell simply referred to it as 'a Unix file server for Dos Pathworks.' He understood that he had 'in fact implemented the netbios protocol' at the time of version 1.0 and that 'this software could be used with other PC clients.'

The name Samba comes from SMB ( Server Message Block), the name of the proprietary protocol used by the Microsoft Windows network file system.Īndrew Tridgell developed the first version of Samba Unix in December 1991 and January 1992, as a PhD student at the Australian National University, using a packet sniffer to do network analysis of the protocol used by DEC Pathworks server software. Samba is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License. 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 also runs on a number of other operating systems such as OpenVMS and IBM i.

Samba runs on most Unix-like systems, such as Linux, Solaris, AIX and the BSD variants, including Apple's macOS Server, and macOS client ( Mac OS X 10.2 and greater). As of version 4, it supports Active Directory and Microsoft Windows NT domains. Samba provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and can integrate with a Microsoft Windows Server domain, either as a Domain Controller (DC) or as a domain member. Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol, and was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell.

Macos samba client