1 ============ 2 Introduction 3 ============ 4 5 This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well 6 as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS) 7 protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block 8 (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early 9 PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now 10 called SMB2 and SMB3. Use of SMB3 (and later, including SMB3.1.1 11 the most current dialect) is strongly preferred over using older 12 dialects like CIFS due to security reasons. All modern dialects, 13 including the most recent, SMB3.1.1, are supported by the CIFS VFS 14 module. The SMB3 protocol is implemented and supported by all major 15 file servers such as Windows (including Windows 2019 Server), as 16 well as by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 server 17 support and tools for Linux and many other operating systems). 18 Apple systems also support SMB3 well, as do most Network Attached 19 Storage vendors, so this network filesystem client can mount to a 20 wide variety of systems. It also supports mounting to the cloud 21 (for example Microsoft Azure), including the necessary security 22 features. 23 24 The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network 25 file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced 26 security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better 27 POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption, 28 high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet 29 signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization 30 improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support the 31 CIFS Unix extensions, and the Linux client also supports SMB3 POSIX extensions, 32 the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and 33 cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments, 34 not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments. 35 36 This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space 37 tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from 38 39 https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git 40 41 or 42 43 git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git 44 45 mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers. 46 47 For more information on the module see the project wiki page at 48 49 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS 50 51 and 52 53 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils
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