Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB networking protocol, and was originally developed by Andrew Tridgell.

Andrew 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.

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.

"[citation needed] With a focus on interoperability with Microsoft's LAN Manager, Tridgell released "netbios for unix", observer, version 1.5 in December 1993.

Tridgell considers the adoption of CVS in May 1996 to mark the birth of the Samba Team, though there had been contributions from other people, especially Jeremy Allison, previously.

[32] On 24 May 2017, it was announced that a remote code execution vulnerability had been found in Samba named EternalRed or SambaCry, affecting all versions since 3.5.0.

[33][34] On 14 September 2020, a proof-of-concept exploit for the netlogon vulnerability called Zerologon (CVE|2020-1472) for which a patch exists since August was published.

(WS-Discovery is implemented on Unix-like platforms by third party daemons which allow Samba shares to be discovered when the deprecated protocols are disabled).

Samba sets up network shares for chosen Unix directories (including all contained subdirectories).

[citation needed] A key difference from Samba was in the implementation of the NT Domains suite of protocols and MSRPC services.

The developers of both projects were interested in seeing the Samba TNG design used to help get ReactOS talking to Windows networks.