Better Understanding of What is CIFS

[mccarthyjd]

Lastnight I read what exactly is CIFS. With some hesitation this morning, I entered on my Linux Command line mount -t cifs //IP address of the Linux system I was on /directory /mnt/ -o user=root and entered my password when prompted. The return was Mount error 13 = Permission Denied. Refer to mount.cfis manpage. As I understand it to be CIFS file systems allow for me to share my Linux folders to Windows Clients in addition to setting up the Samba Share using the Samba GUI Manager. Do I have it backwards and CIFS is for Windows Clients to share there data with Linux Systems. If CIFS is for Linux Files to share there files with windows, how do I setup or format the folder for CIFS?

[alf55]

CIFS is based on a prgram SMB that was written by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for PC-DOS to be able to talk to a share on the their hardware which typically ran VMS (or a Unix). DEC meet it demise and portions were sold to the wind (by corporate raiders in the 1980's). They also migrated it to work with early versions of Windows as well. During the selling of DEC to the winds, Microsoft bought a few portions of DEC. One was SMB code and another was a bunch of VMS developers (and they did NT, XP, and Windows7 and not Vista which was attempted by ".net" developers.)

Microsoft went on to use SMB to share between windows machines. Since SAMBA was written by Unix developer, that wanted to talk to his DEC share, and Micosoft would not let him continue to use SMB, he found a new name which still has the SMB in it the name (SaMBa). Over time Microsoft started a slow but persistent name change to CIFS. (In my opinion, the name change was being made to make it look like something that they created and controlled rather than something that was simply bought!)

As in the old days a Unix-like computer (running Linux or Solaris) is again hosting the shares in lots of use cases to Windows machines (as windows based computers do not support may options for shared disk space!)

[mccarthyjd]

First CIFS is a protocol that utlizes samba. Ensure usernames, passwords and windows permissions all match up. On the Linux Box type the below:

mount -t cifs -o username=testuser,gid=501,file_mode=0775,dir_mode= 0775,forceuid,forcegid //192.168.10.5/Data /mnt

above I'm saying mount the windows drive Data in the linux volume /mnt. Authenticate with the linux testuser account, assign group and owner permissions of the directory and all files of 7 and all others of 5. Force the uid and gid for those permissions which maybe previously applied.
B]References:[/B]

samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/mount.cifs.8.html
samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/umount.cifs.8.html

linux.die.net/man/8/mount.cifs

linux.die.net/man/8/umount.cifs

research.kek.jp/people/yashiro/guide/linux/manage/setup/samba.html

Book: Unix and Linux System Administration Handbook Fourth Edition

Thanks to all that posted it made cifs more clear.

[Rubberman]

Both of the previous posts are good, and correct. Just FYI, CIFS means "Common Internet File System". and to the layman is simply the updated version of the SMB (Samba) file system, which was originally Microsoft's network file system protocol. As far as Linux is concerned, Samba is the Linux server side, and CIFS is the client side that allows you to mount Microsoft (or Linux Samba) shared resources.

In any case, if you are getting a "permission denied" message from a Windows share, then it probably means that your username/password combination is incorrect, or that the Windows system has disallowed that user from accessing the share in question.

[alf55]

SMB was from Digital Equipment Corporation.