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Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07001 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