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diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/cifs/introduction.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/cifs/introduction.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..0b98f672d36f --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/cifs/introduction.rst @@ -0,0 +1,53 @@ +============ +Introduction +============ + + This is the client VFS module for the SMB3 NAS protocol as well + as for older dialects such as the Common Internet File System (CIFS) + protocol which was the successor to the Server Message Block + (SMB) protocol, the native file sharing mechanism for most early + PC operating systems. New and improved versions of CIFS are now + called SMB2 and SMB3. Use of SMB3 (and later, including SMB3.1.1) + is strongly preferred over using older dialects like CIFS due to + security reaasons. All modern dialects, including the most recent, + SMB3.1.1 are supported by the CIFS VFS module. The SMB3 protocol + is implemented and supported by all major file servers + such as all modern versions of Windows (including Windows 2016 + Server), as well as by Samba (which provides excellent + CIFS/SMB2/SMB3 server support and tools for Linux and many other + operating systems). Apple systems also support SMB3 well, as + do most Network Attached Storage vendors, so this network + filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of systems. + It also supports mounting to the cloud (for example + Microsoft Azure), including the necessary security features. + + The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network + file system function for SMB3 compliant servers, including advanced + security features, excellent parallelized high performance i/o, better + POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, encryption, + high performance safe distributed caching (leases/oplocks), optional packet + signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization + improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support + the CIFS Unix extensions (and in the future SMB3 POSIX extensions), + the combination can provide a reasonable alternative to other network and + cluster file systems for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments, + not just in Linux to Windows (or Linux to Mac) environments. + + This filesystem has a mount utility (mount.cifs) and various user space + tools (including smbinfo and setcifsacl) that can be obtained from + + https://git.samba.org/?p=cifs-utils.git + + or + + git://git.samba.org/cifs-utils.git + + mount.cifs should be installed in the directory with the other mount helpers. + + For more information on the module see the project wiki page at + + https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS + + and + + https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_utils |