[Samba] Picking the right installer

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 12:34 PM, Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 05, 2012 at 01:01:19AM +0100, Andrew wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>>
>> Today, I was suggested to use Samba by Plone people, meaning I Hadn't heard of Samba before. It seems to be exactly what I have been looking for for some time, but I obviously am completely blank about Samba, so you will excuse my silly question, please.
>>
>> I want to install Samba on my server, but after over two hours searching the site, I found there are plenty of very useful documentation, but not enough tips for a newbie like me to start with.
>>
>> Follows what I have, so you can kindly tell me which installer I must download to start.
>>
>> Apache Linux server (Arvixe)
>> PC running Windows 7 Ultimate with MS Office.
>>
>> My problem arises from the fact that after all the time spent searching and reading I did not understand whether the installers are recommended according to the server or to the PC-OS. Which one shall I use, please?
>>
>>
>> Thank you very much for enlightening me.
>
> If you install a standard Linux distribution (the most
> popular are Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu or Debian) then it
> will include a Samba server package (or the ability
> to add one). I would start there if I were you.


It's not necessarily automatically installed, and is usually grouped
among "server" packages. Arvixe is, from casual checking, a web
hosting company. If you're going to host a Samba server on a web host,
do double check your contract to make sure that the contract allows
that sort of service: it's very easy for someone thinking "I'll just
set up an FTP server/NFS server/Samba server" to allow generous
uploading and downloading of shared materials, and get in deep trouble
because people abuse anonymous or poorly managed services for hosting
"warez" or personnel material, and eat up all your bandwidth.

Many web hosting companies set up a dedicated virtual host with FTP or
other upload technologies for the website, and do *not* allow the
running of other services because it's really only one host used by
multiple virtual clients, not a real host for each client. Others
block the ports for Samba and NFS as a matter of basic security: so do
some ISP's, so it can take extra work to gain access to such a server.

What, exactly, are you trying to achieve? And given that you are
reviewing Plone, why? It's a bit confusing as to why an open source
content management needs file system sharing like Samba, when freeware
content management systems like "git" do a very good job of managing
and especially of merging distributed source control.