Samba is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol for Unix systems, providing support for cross-platform file sharing with Microsoft Windows, OS X, and other Unix systems. Samba can also function as a domain controller or member server in both NT4-style and Active Directory domains.

This package provides winbindd, a daemon which integrates authentication and directory service (user/group lookup) mechanisms from a Windows domain on a Linux system.

Winbind based user/group lookups via /etc/nsswitch.conf can be enabled via the libnss-winbind package. Winbind based Windows domain authentication can be enabled via the libpam-winbind package.