Samba is a Linux/UNIX software package that allows you to share files and directories with computers running other operating systems over the network. It also allows your Linux desktop or laptop to sign into a Windows network and be able to share files inside a workgroup

Most often, when someone talks about a filesystem or file system, they're referring to disk filesystems such as NTFS, FAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, ISO 9660 and many others but can also refer to network file systems such as CIFS (Common Internet File System aka Samba) and NFS. A filesystem is a specially-designed database of files, their disk location, definition and attributes.

One of the most important tasks an administrator has is to set up and maintain storage resources and let users share files across the network. FreeNAS, a NAS server based on FreeBSD, makes implementing NAS simple. With FreeNAS, you can share files among the Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Unix machines on your network.

* «With the Hurd, users can change anything in their system which doesn't affect other users.»

Here is a howto about the configuring ip using networking related files in Ubuntu / Debian systems.
The interfaces file contains the details of all configurations...

File: /etc/network/interfaces
This file contains network interface configuration information for the ifup and ifdown commands. This is where you configure how your system is connected to the network.

A complicated third-party arrangement means that the open-source Samba project will be able to make use of proprietary documents describing Microsoft file-sharing software.

Samba, governed by the General Public License (GPL), lets Unix or Linux servers behave like Windows machines used to share files over a network and control networked printers. But the effort has been difficult: Microsoft doesn't go out of its way to share the details of the protocols; patent infringement concerns also have appeared more than once.

I own 50% of a manufacturing company in Bridgwater. When we bought the company out of receivership in ‘03 we had no systems at all. Our former parent company was running a character based ERP system called MAX on Unix and a Windows file serving network.

The patches adopted in Linux 2.6.30 introduce many significant changes affecting data security and Ext3 and Ext4 performance. Support for the EXOFS and NILFS2 file systems is new, as is the cache for the AFS and NFS network file systems. There are also a few fixes for the almost forgotten ReiserFS file system.

Let's indulge my wanderlust this month and ramble around the UNIX file system. From /bin to /var, there are lots of interesting sights to see—some well trodden and others obscure—and shortly, you'll know your way around like the locals.