One of the most powerful features of the Samba software is its share capabilities for the server-side and the client-side code. We will focus on the server-side features here, and we will also focus on how to make the shares available to our Active Directory environment, but we cannot forget that being able to access these shares from other operating systems (for example, GNU/Linux) is a very important feature too. Samba provides all this as an open source solution since Version 3 is in a very mature state.

Users and system administrators who used Version 3 and earlier versions of the Samba software will see that with the new Version 4, the file share capabilities are much easier to implement and manage. In the earlier versions, we had to basically perform all the configurations on the smb.conf file and control what was possible on the filesystem and/or the configuration file (for example, smb.conf).

File sharing with Samba 4 is a simple task. Basically, we just...