1 This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well
2 as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS)
3 protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block
4 (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
5 PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now
6 called SMB2 and SMB3. Use of SMB3 (and later, including SMB3.1.1)
7 is strongly preferred over using older dialects like CIFS due to
8 security reaasons. All modern dialects, including the most recent,
9 SMB3.1.1 are supported by the CIFS VFS module. The SMB3 protocol
10 is implemented and supported by all major file servers
11 such as all modern versions of Windows (including Windows 2016
12 Server), as well as by Samba (which provides excellent
13 CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 server support and tools for Linux and many other
14 operating systems). Apple systems also support SMB3 well, as
15 do most Network Attached Storage vendors, so this network
16 filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of systems.
17 It also supports mounting to the cloud (for example
18 Microsoft Azure), including the necessary security features.
20 The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
21 file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced
22 security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better
23 POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption,
24 high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet
25 signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
26 improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support
27 the CIFS Unix extensions (and in the future SMB3 POSIX extensions),
28 the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and
29 cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,
30 not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments.
32 This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space
33 tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from
35 https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git
37 git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git
39 mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers.
41 For more information on the module see the project wiki page at
43 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS
45 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils