| This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well | |
| 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. These dialects are also supported by the | |
| CIFS VFS module. CIFS is fully supported by network | |
| file servers such as Windows 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012 and 2016 | |
| as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS | |
| server support for Linux and many other operating systems), Apple | |
| systems, as well as most Network Attached Storage vendors, so | |
| this network filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of | |
| servers. | |
| 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 an mount utility (mount.cifs) that can be obtained from | |
| https://ftp.samba.org/pub/linux-cifs/cifs-utils/ | |
| It must 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_utils |