Samba is a file and print server that runs under Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Samba is an implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, also known as the Common Internet File System (CIFS), which is a popular file- and printer-sharing protocol on Windows.
Samba is a file and print server that runs under Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. Samba is an implementation of the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, also known as the Common Internet File System (CIFS), which is a popular file- and printer-sharing protocol on Windows.
Linux has long provided SMB/CIFS client support via the smbmount command and the smbfs filesystem driver, but this support has had problems: you must assign ownership and permissions to all files at mount time, links aren’t supported, and special file types aren’t supported. These problems have limited the use of SMB/CIFS in Linux-to-Linux file sharing scenarios. Instead, the Network File System (NFS) or other protocols have been the preferred protocols for this function.
This situation is changing, though. Samba 3.0 adds a new feature, Unix extensions, that adds support for Unix filesystem features to the SMB/CIFS protocol, and the 2.6-series Linux kernel provides client-side support for these features in the form of a new filesystem driver known as cifs. Using these tools, you can gain access to many Unix filesystem features that would have otherwise been lost using the older smbfs mount code or the smbmount command.
To be sure, this support is not yet perfect. Some filesystem features don’t yet work quite correctly and the driver is less reliable than the older smbfs driver. Nonetheless, you may want to investigate using the cifs driver as a means of reducing the server count on your network. As time goes by,…
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