Difference between revisions of "Linux CIFS Utils and Samba"

Revision as of 10:12, 27 February 2014

Samba was developed by a team by using "network analysis" or "protocol analysis" to create file and print services to Microsoft Windows clients and servers. Samba is free open source software. Samba makes possible interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients and servers. Samba originally worked with SMB (Server Message Block) to communicate with Windows machines. Today CIFS (Common Internet File System) is used instead. As a footnote, Samba dates back to 1992!

What are the differences between CIFS and SAMBA?

Today Samba implements the CIFS network protocol to work with changes Microsoft has made in their Windows networking platform. CIFS is the extension of the SMB protocol. The in-kernel CIFS filesystem is generally the preferred method for mounting SMB/CIFS shares on Linux.

The original protocol for sharing files, disks, directories, and printers across a network of Microsoft machines was by use of Server Message Block. There are underlying protocols involved with SMB with some examples being: "NetBIOS over NetBEUI" and "NetBIOS over TCP/IP" Samba traditionally required "NetBIOS over TCP/IP" and didn't support "NetBIOS over NetBEUI." This is fine as NetBEUI is not Internet routable and is not a currently support protocol, even by Microsoft. WINS is for resolving a NetBIOS name to an IP address, however, modern implementations avoid NetBIOS usage though Internal DNS.

CIFS pretty much takes care of all connectivity on a network for your *nix machines and Microsoft Windows. However, Samba does still support SMB and an example where this is useful may be if sharing with older Windows operating systems still using NetBIOS that will want to connect to the Samba server via port 137, 138, 139. The modern CIFS protocol is strictly port 445. This is 'smbfs' versus the modern 'cifs' in Linux.

Microsoft is the industry bully, trying to lay claim to protocols and technologies developed by others. Microsoft tried to claim SMB as their own by calling it Microsoft Networking. The company was a force behind the renaming of SMB (Server Message Block) to CIFS (Common Internet File System.)

The cifs utils Package

The cifs-utils package is available for modern Linux kernels as the protocol is supported directly in the kernel. The cifs-utils package is not part of Samba, although they were originally included with it. Today you do not need to install Samba to have cifs-utils. Install the cifs-utils package for connectivity to Microsoft Networks. Samba is not deprecated. Samba provides both cifs and smb support, and comes with many additional tools. For basic connectivity to a modern Microsoft Windows Network, Samba is simply no longer necessary.

This documentation is largely Linux centric and cifs-utils is a package for Linux systems. Under distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu you can check to see if you have cifs-utils installed and what version it is by typing the command:

apt-cache policy cifs-utils