0.5 Scope

Our focus is on the inner workings of CIFS filesharing, particularly the client side. Through necessity (and a macabre sense of fascination) we will also cover NetBIOS LAN emulation over TCP/IP, basic SMB authentication, and browsing. We will delicately dance around the NT Domain system and CIFS for W2K. These are much bigger and hairier, and deserve their own books. ^[2]

^[2] ...and if we find any such books, we will list them in the References section.

The book is separated into three main parts :

I. NBT: NetBIOS over TCP/IP

This part covers the NBT protocol, which is an implementation of the NetBIOS API on top of TCP/IP. NBT is necessary for communicating with older CIFS servers and clients .

II. SMB: The Server Message Block Protocol

Part II covers SMB, the filesharing protocol at the core of CIFS. This part also covers authentication.

III. Browsing: Advertising Services

The Browser Service is built on top of NBT and SMB and is used to distribute information about the SMB fileservers available on the network.

Following these three parts are appendices, a glossary, bibliography for further reading, and an indexall the good stuff you would expect in such a book.