[deltarholamda]

It also impressed me, as I'm not sure I'd have that sort of dogged patience. Samba is one of those incredibly useful pieces of open source software that sometimes I feel I take for granted.

I won't take it for granted now.

As a side note, the documentation has been pretty darn good too. I set up an AD server in Samba just from the docs, with a bit of additional help from Stack Overflow. It was only after I had finished that I determined that I could do what I needed with just the basic Samba user/groups. (My needs were not complicated enough to justify the extra overhead of AD.)

[vessenes]

Samba was arguably the way Linux snuck into corporations in the late 90s. Microsoft’s server offerings were truly terrible in that era, compared to getting a very functional Unix-a-like for free out of commodity hardware. Terrible and expensive. The issue was, you needed to be able to do group file sharing to windows desktops, full stop. IT teams wanted Linux, bad, for nerd and quality of life reasons. They also wanted Apache, not IIS. As Samba stabilized, Linux boxen quietly started appearing without notice or fanfare, and never left.