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+============
+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