Implementing CIFS: The Common Internet File System

Author : Christopher R. Hertel, member of the Samba Team
ISBN : 0-13-047116-X
Pages : 672
Publication Date : August 11, 2003
Publisher : Prentice Hall
Free License : Open Publication License v1.0 or later

Book Excerpts:

For years, developers and administrators have struggled to understand CIFS, Microsoft's poorly documented standard for Internet file sharing. This book is a cross-platform guide to CIFS capabilities and behavior. Implementing CIFS not only delivers the knowledge of a Samba Team member dedicated to investigating the inner workings of CIFS, it also identifies and describes crucial specifications and supporting documents.

For that purpose, this book:
- Provides information for designing and debugging large Windows and/or Samba networks
- Offers introductions to Server Message Block (SMB), NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NBT), browser services, and authentication
- Drills down into the internals of CIFS, showing its behavior on the wire and at the desktop—and its strange features
- Includes the SNIA CIFS Technical Reference.

Intended Audience:

This book is aimed at developers who want to add CIFS compatibility to their products. It will also be very helpful to network and system administrators who need to understand the things that CIFS does on the wire, in the server, and at the desktop. In addition, some of the Internet security community (both the light and the dark sides) is interested in the (mis)behavior of the CIFS suite. This is a technical book, and knowledge of programming and TCP/IP networking is assumed. The protocol descriptions, however, start with the basics and build up, so very little previous knowledge of CIFS is expected.

For the programmer, there are several code examples. They have all been tested under Debian GNU/Linux, but readers may need to do a little work to get them to run elsewhere. The code is intended to be illustrative rather than functional. It works, but it is not production-quality. Those who do like source can find additional examples at http://ubiqx.org/libcifs/ .

Reviews:

Amazon.com

"I really like this book. The internals of the CIFS protocol is not a subject for the faint hearted, but Chris has really tackled it well. This is just the right book for people like me who want to understand what is going on on their network at the bits and bytes level."

"If want to know CIFS/SAMBA/NetBIOS internals, this is the book to read."

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