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Mauro Carvalho Chehabf1392912019-07-31 17:08:51 -03001============
2Introduction
3============
4
Steve Frenchec11653b2017-09-14 14:51:20 -05005 This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -05006 as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS)
Steve Frenchec11653b2017-09-14 14:51:20 -05007 protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -07008 (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
Björn Jacke81b66222013-09-10 10:28:38 +02009 PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now
Steve French731ddc02021-02-15 23:56:40 -060010 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.
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -070023
24 The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
Steve Frenchec11653b2017-09-14 14:51:20 -050025 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
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -070029 signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
Steve French731ddc02021-02-15 23:56:40 -060030 improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support the
31 CIFS Unix extensions, and the Linux client also suppors SMB3 POSIX extensions,
Steve Frenchec11653b2017-09-14 14:51:20 -050032 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.
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -070035
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -050036 This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space
37 tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -070038
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -050039 https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git
Mauro Carvalho Chehabf1392912019-07-31 17:08:51 -030040
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -050041 or
Mauro Carvalho Chehabf1392912019-07-31 17:08:51 -030042
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -050043 git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -070044
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -050045 mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers.
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -070046
Björn Jacke81b66222013-09-10 10:28:38 +020047 For more information on the module see the project wiki page at
Linus Torvalds1da177e2005-04-16 15:20:36 -070048
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -050049 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS
Mauro Carvalho Chehabf1392912019-07-31 17:08:51 -030050
Steve French65525802019-03-13 18:21:38 -050051 and
Mauro Carvalho Chehabf1392912019-07-31 17:08:51 -030052
Björn Jacke81b66222013-09-10 10:28:38 +020053 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils