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