By Christopher R. Hertel
CIFS is a network filesystem plus a set of auxiliary services supported by a bunch of underlying protocols. Any and all of these various bits have been called CIFS, which leaves us with a somewhat muddy definition. To make things easier, we'll start by saying that CIFS is "Microsoft's way of doing network file sharing", and work out the details as we go on.
The name "CIFS", of course, is an acronym. It stands for Common Internet File System, a title which deserves a bit of dissection:
Common
The term has a variety of connotations, but we will assume that Microsoft was thinking of common in the sense of commonly available or commonly used. All MS operating systems have had some form of CIFS networking available or built in, and there are implementations of CIFS for most major non-MS operating systems as well.
The term has a variety of connotations, but we will assume that Microsoft was thinking of common in the sense of commonly available or commonly used. All MS operating systems have had some form of CIFS networking available or built in, and there are implementations of CIFS for most major non-MS operating systems as well.
Unfortunately, there is not yet a specification for CIFS that is complete, correct, authoritative, and freely available. Microsoft defines CIFS by their implementations and, as we shall see, their attempts at documenting the complete suite have been somewhat random. This has an adverse impact on the commonality of the system.......