Name
CIFS — CIFS support (advanced network filesystem for Samba, Window and other CIFS compliant servers)
This is the client VFS module for the Common Internet File
System (CIFS) protocol, which is the successor to the Server Message
Block (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early
PC operating systems. The CIFS protocol is fully supported by file
servers such as Windows 2000 (including Windows 2003, NT 4 and Windows
XP) as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS server support for
Linux and many other operating systems). Limited support for Windows
ME and similar servers is provided as well. You must use the smbfs client filesystem to access older SMB
servers such as OS/2 and DOS.
The intent of the cifs module
is to provide an advanced network file system client for mounting
local filesystems to CIFS compliant servers, including support for DFS
(hierarchical name space), secure per-user session establishment, safe
distributed caching (oplock), optional packet signing, Unicode and
other internationalization improvements, and optional Winbind
(nsswitch) integration. You do not need to enable cifs if you are
running only a server (Samba). It is possible to enable both smbfs and cifs (e.g. if you are using CIFS for
accessing Windows 2003 and Samba 3 servers, and smbfs for accessing old servers). If you
need to mount to Samba or Windows from this machine, say yes to this
option.
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