Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

Name

CIFS — CIFS support (advanced network filesystem for Samba, Window and other CIFS compliant servers)

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. The CIFS protocol is fully supported by file servers such as Windows 2000 (including Windows 2003, NT 4 and Windows XP) as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS server support for Linux and many other operating systems). Limited support for Windows ME and similar servers is provided as well. You must use the smbfs client filesystem to access older SMB servers such as OS/2 and DOS.

The intent of the cifs module is to provide an advanced network file system client for mounting local filesystems to CIFS compliant servers, including support for DFS (hierarchical name space), secure per-user session establishment, safe distributed caching (oplock), optional packet signing, Unicode and other internationalization improvements, and optional Winbind (nsswitch) integration. You do not need to enable cifs if you are running only a server (Samba). It is possible to enable both smbfs and cifs (e.g. if you are using CIFS for accessing Windows 2003 and Samba 3 servers, and smbfs for accessing old servers). If you need to mount to Samba or Windows from this machine, say yes to this option.