We'll wrap up this chapter with a short tutorial on SMB/CIFS. SMB/CIFS is the protocol that Windows 95/98 and NT machines use to communicate with the Samba server and each other. At a high level, the SMB protocol suite is relatively simple. It includes commands for all of the file and print operations that you might do on a local disk or printer, such as:
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Opening and closing a file
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Creating and deleting files and directories
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Reading and writing a file
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Searching for files
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Queueing and dequeueing files to a print spool
Each of these operations can be encoded into an SMB message and transmitted to and from a server. The original name SMB comes from their data format: these are versions of the standard DOS system-call data structures, or
Server Message Blocks, redesigned for transmitting to another machine across a network.
