1 This is the client VFS module for the Common Internet File System 2 (CIFS) protocol which is the successor to the Server Message Block 3 (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early 4 PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now 5 called SMB2 and SMB3. These dialects are also supported by the 6 CIFS VFS module. CIFS is fully supported by network 7 file servers such as Windows 2000, 2003, 2008 and 2012 8 as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS 9 server support for Linux and many other operating systems), so 10 this network filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of 11 servers. 12 13 The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network 14 file system function for CIFS compliant servers, including better 15 POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, high 16 performance safe distributed caching (oplock), optional packet 17 signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization 18 improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support 19 the CIFS Unix extensions, the combination can provide a reasonable 20 alternative to NFSv4 for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments, 21 not just in Linux to Windows environments. 22 23 This filesystem has an mount utility (mount.cifs) that can be obtained from 24 25 https://ftp.samba.org/pub/linux-cifs/cifs-utils/ 26 27 It must be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers. 28 29 For more information on the module see the project wiki page at 30 31 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils 32