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.  CIFS is fully supported by current network
    file servers such as Windows 2000, Windows 2003 (including  
    Windows XP) as well by Samba (which provides excellent CIFS
    server support for Linux and many other operating systems), so
    this network filesystem client can mount to a wide variety of
    servers.  The smbfs module should be used instead of this cifs module
    for mounting to older SMB servers such as OS/2.  The smbfs and cifs
    modules can coexist and do not conflict.  The CIFS VFS filesystem
    module is designed to work well with servers that implement the
    newer versions (dialects) of the SMB/CIFS protocol such as Samba, 
    the program written by Andrew Tridgell that turns any Unix host 
    into a SMB/CIFS file server.
  
    The intent of this module is to provide the most advanced network
    file system function for CIFS compliant servers, including better
    POSIX compliance, secure per-user session establishment, high
    performance safe distributed caching (oplock), optional packet
    signing, large files, Unicode support and other internationalization
    improvements. Since both Samba server and this filesystem client support
    the CIFS Unix extensions, the combination can provide a reasonable 
    alternative to NFSv4 for fileserving in some Linux to Linux environments,
    not just in Linux to Windows environments.
  
    This filesystem has an optional mount utility (mount.cifs) that can
    be obtained from the project page and installed in the path in the same
    directory with the other mount helpers (such as mount.smbfs). 
    Mounting using the cifs filesystem without installing the mount helper
    requires specifying the server's ip address.
  
    For Linux 2.4:
      mount //anything/here /mnt_target -o
              user=username,pass=password,unc=//ip_address_of_server/sharename
  
    For Linux 2.5: 
      mount //ip_address_of_server/sharename /mnt_target -o user=username, pass=password
  
  
    For more information on the module see the project page at
  
        http://us1.samba.org/samba/Linux_CIFS_client.html 
  
    For more information on CIFS see:
  
        http://www.snia.org/tech_activities/CIFS
  
    or the Samba site:
       
        http://www.samba.org