0.4 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 curious things that CIFS does on the wire, in the server, and at the desktop. In addition, there is empirical evidence which suggests that the Internet security community (both the light and the dark sides) is keenly 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 you 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. That's okay, since part of the purpose of this book is to help you write your own codeif that's where your interests lie. If you don't care about source code you can safely skip much of it. Those who do like source can find additional examples at http://ubiqx.org/libcifs/.

A certain amount of SMB/CIFS protocol information has been available since the early days, but finding the important bits typically involves digging through detailed technical references, protocol specifications, packet dumps, web pages, whitepapers, source code, and mailing list archives. That's a lot of work, and a nuisance, and annoying. As a result, CIFS development has become an arcane art practiced by an elite few... and that's a darned shame.

This book attempts to solve this problem by selectively digging through the muck and presenting the uncovered gems in a coherent form, thus making the CIFS suite more accessible to more people.



Implementing CIFS. The Common Internet File System
Implementing CIFS: The Common Internet File System
ISBN: 013047116X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 210

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