Server Message Block
updated Jan 23, 2008 1:32 pm | 2,164 views
Server Message Block (SMB) is a client server based and application level network protocol normally running on Microsoft Windows environment that provides an authenticated IPC (Inter-Process Communication) mechanism between the network nodes of a computer network and facilitates the shared access to network resources such as files, printers and other network devices.
The SMB protocol is normally used on top of other network protocols such as IPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange) a networking protocol from Novell, and NetBEUI (NetBIOS Extended User Interface) for LAN communication and can also be used on top of its TCP/IP protocol for communication over the Internet.
An improved version of SMB, that is SMB 2.0, has been introduced with Windows Vista which has an ability to merge multiple client requests into a single request therfore reducing the number of round-trips that the client used to make to the server.
Server Message Block or SMB was originally invented by Barry Feigenbaum of IBM because he found a requirement for utilizing the MS-DOS Interrupt 33 (21h), (which controls local file-access) to create a sort of networked file-system.
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