0001 ============
0002 Introduction
0003 ============
0004
0005 This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well
0006 as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS)
0007 protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block
0008 (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
0009 PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now
0010 called SMB2 and SMB3. Use of SMB3 (and later, including SMB3.1.1
0011 the most current dialect) is strongly preferred over using older
0012 dialects like CIFS due to security reasons. All modern dialects,
0013 including the most recent, SMB3.1.1, are supported by the CIFS VFS
0014 module. The SMB3 protocol is implemented and supported by all major
0015 file servers such as Windows (including Windows 2019 Server), as
0016 well as by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 server
0017 support and tools for Linux and many other operating systems).
0018 Apple systems also support SMB3 well, as do most Network Attached
0019 Storage vendors, so this network filesystem client can mount to a
0020 wide variety of systems. It also supports mounting to the cloud
0021 (for example Microsoft Azure), including the necessary security
0022 features.
0023
0024 The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
0025 file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced
0026 security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better
0027 POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption,
0028 high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet
0029 signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
0030 improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support the
0031 CIFS Unix extensions, and the Linux client also suppors SMB3 POSIX extensions,
0032 the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and
0033 cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,
0034 not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments.
0035
0036 This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space
0037 tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from
0038
0039 https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git
0040
0041 or
0042
0043 git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git
0044
0045 mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers.
0046
0047 For more information on the module see the project wiki page at
0048
0049 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS
0050
0051 and
0052
0053 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils
