On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 00:01 -0500, Peter Van Lone wrote:
On 3/12/07, John Andersen
wrote: smbfs and cifs are file systems that allow your Linux box to MOUNT a share published by a samab server or a windows box. (perhaps to do a backup or some such)
ahh .. ok, perfect.
So the appropriate comparison is NOT samba vs cifs, but rather smbfs vs cifs. Both are client protocols/virtual file system implementations.
So, from google reading, cifs was apparently microsofts addition to the original SMB file system spec ... and now, it is a somewhat newer vfs that can exist along side of or instead of smbfs. Theoretically it offers, newer/better/fancier services/access to remote SAMBA provided storage.
About right?
Yes and no. "SMB" was the original name, "CIFS" is Microsoft's later re-branding of it, but MS was extending SMB long before they renamed it, and there isn't really any useful distinction you can make between the two names. The distinction you *can* make is between "smbfs", which is an old, unmaintained and partly-broken SMB/CIFS client kernel module for Linux, and "cifs", which is a newer, actively-developed SMB/CIFS client kernel module for Linux. The fact that one has "smb" in its name and the other has "cifs" in its name isn't really all that relevant. The point is just that they're two separate codebases, and SUSE used to ship smbfs, but doesn't any more (because cifs is maintained and smbfs isn't, so bugs reported against smbfs will never get fixed, while bugs against cifs will). -- Dan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org