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. CIFS is fully supported by current network file servers such as Windows 2000, Windows 2003 (including Windows XP) as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS server support for Linux and many other operating systems), so this network filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of servers. The smbfs module should be used instead of this cifs module for mounting to older SMB servers such as OS/2. The smbfs and cifs modules can coexist and do not conflict. The CIFS VFS filesystem module is designed to work well with servers that implement the newer versions (dialects) of the SMB/CIFS protocol such as Samba, the program written by Andrew Tridgell that turns any Unix host into a SMB/CIFS file server. The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network file system function for CIFS compliant servers, including better POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, high performance safe distributed caching (oplock), optional packet signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support the CIFS Unix extensions, the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to NFSv4 for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments, not just in Linux to Windows environments. This filesystem has an optional mount utility (mount.cifs) that can be obtained from the project page and installed in the path in the same directory with the other mount helpers (such as mount.smbfs). Mounting using the cifs filesystem without installing the mount helper requires specifying the server's ip address. For Linux 2.4: mount //anything/here /mnt_target -o user=username,pass=password,unc=//ip_address_of_server/sharename For Linux 2.5: mount //ip_address_of_server/sharename /mnt_target -o user=username, pass=password For more information on the module see the project page at http://us1.samba.org/samba/Linux_CIFS_client.html For more information on CIFS see: http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/CIFS or the Samba site: http://www.samba.org