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1============2Introduction3============4 5 This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well6 as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS)7 protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block8 (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early9 PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now10 called SMB2 and SMB3. Use of SMB3 (and later, including SMB3.1.111 the most current dialect) is strongly preferred over using older12 dialects like CIFS due to security reasons. All modern dialects,13 including the most recent, SMB3.1.1, are supported by the CIFS VFS14 module. The SMB3 protocol is implemented and supported by all major15 file servers such as Windows (including Windows 2019 Server), as16 well as by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 server17 support and tools for Linux and many other operating systems).18 Apple systems also support SMB3 well, as do most Network Attached19 Storage vendors, so this network filesystem client can mount to a20 wide variety of systems. It also supports mounting to the cloud21 (for example Microsoft Azure), including the necessary security22 features.23 24 The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network25 file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced26 security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better27 POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption,28 high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet29 signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization30 improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support the31 CIFS Unix extensions, and the Linux client also supports SMB3 POSIX extensions,32 the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and33 cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,34 not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments.35 36 This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space37 tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from38 39 https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git40 41 or42 43 git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git44 45 mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers.46 47 For more information on the module see the project wiki page at48 49 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS50 51 and52 53 https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils54