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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 000000000..53ea62906 --- /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 + the most current dialect) is strongly preferred over using older + dialects like CIFS due to security reasons. 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 Windows (including Windows 2019 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 the Linux client also suppors 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 |