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Documentation / filesystems / cifs.txt


Based on kernel version 3.11. Page generated on 2013-09-03 22:59 EST.

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
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