What is the Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS)?
The initial pressure for Microsoft to document their current SMB implementation came from the Samba team, who kept coming across things on the wire that Microsoft either didn’t know about or hadn’t documented anywhere (even in the sourcecode to Windows NT.) Then Sun Microsystems came out with their WebNFS initiative, designed to replace FTP for file transfers on the Internet. There are many drawbacks to WebNFS (including its scope – it aims to replace HTTP as well!) but the concept was attractive. FTP is not very clever, and why should it be harder to get files from across the world than across the room? Some hasty revisions were made and an Internet Draft for the Common Internet Filesystem (CIFS) was released. Note that CIFS is not an Internet standard and is a very long way from becoming one, BUT the protocol specification is in the public domain and ongoing discussions concerning the spec take place on a public mailing list according to the rules of the Internet Engineering Task For
