Root/Documentation/filesystems/cifs.txt

1  This is the client VFS module for the Common Internet File System
2  (CIFS) protocol which is the successor to the Server Message Block
3  (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
4  PC operating systems. CIFS is fully supported by current network
5  file servers such as Windows 2000, Windows 2003 (including
6  Windows XP) as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS
7  server support for Linux and many other operating systems), so
8  this network filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of
9  servers. The smbfs module should be used instead of this cifs module
10  for mounting to older SMB servers such as OS/2. The smbfs and cifs
11  modules can coexist and do not conflict. The CIFS VFS filesystem
12  module is designed to work well with servers that implement the
13  newer versions (dialects) of the SMB/CIFS protocol such as Samba,
14  the program written by Andrew Tridgell that turns any Unix host
15  into a SMB/CIFS file server.
16
17  The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
18  file system function for CIFS compliant servers, including better
19  POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, high
20  performance safe distributed caching (oplock), optional packet
21  signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
22  improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support
23  the CIFS Unix extensions, the combination can provide a reasonable
24  alternative to NFSv4 for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,
25  not just in Linux to Windows environments.
26
27  This filesystem has an optional mount utility (mount.cifs) that can
28  be obtained from the project page and installed in the path in the same
29  directory with the other mount helpers (such as mount.smbfs).
30  Mounting using the cifs filesystem without installing the mount helper
31  requires specifying the server's ip address.
32
33  For Linux 2.4:
34    mount //anything/here /mnt_target -o
35            user=username,pass=password,unc=//ip_address_of_server/sharename
36
37  For Linux 2.5:
38    mount //ip_address_of_server/sharename /mnt_target -o user=username, pass=password
39
40
41  For more information on the module see the project page at
42
43      http://us1.samba.org/samba/Linux_CIFS_client.html
44
45  For more information on CIFS see:
46
47      http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/CIFS
48
49  or the Samba site:
50     
51      http://www.samba.org
52

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