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