Chapter 2 CIFS/9000 Product Overview
CIFS is a file system specification called Common Internet File System, which evolved from Microsoft’s SMB protocol for Windows operating systems. CIFS/9000 is an HP -UX product (based upon Samba version 2.0.6, 2.0.7 in 3/2001, or 2.0.9 in 9/2001) that utilizes the Common Internet File System to provide two major benefits for two platforms. First, the CIFS/9000 Server delivers smooth file and print sharing access to both Windows and UNIX platform clients, but with all of the benefits of a HP-UX operating system. Second, the CIFS/9000 Client delivers HP-UX client access to both Windows and UNIX file servers, and integrated user authentication between HP-UX and Windows domains using NTLM.
CIFS/9000 allows management consolidation of many Windows servers onto a reliable, highly available HP-UX operating system, while still delivering file access to Windows clients utilizing their native CIFS (SMB) protocol. CIFS/9000 also provides a common platform for efficient file sharing from varying client access methods: Windows, UNIX, NFS, or PC/NFS. The versatility of CIFS/9000 allows Windows-only file serving, UNIX-only file serving, or mixed file serving.
To ensure integrity and security of user data files despite the variable client access methods, file locking can be enabled at the file system and/or application level.
