| When HP-UX 10.20 was the most recent version of HP-UX, CIFS/9000 wasn't available. If you were an HP-UX administrator and you wanted to integrate file sharing between HP-UX and Windows-based machines, you had three choices: purchase ASU/9000 (Advanced Server for UNIX, previously known as LanManager for UNIX), purchase PC-NFS, or use the freeware software known as SAMBA. Because it's freeware, HP would not offer any official support for the SAMBA software if you had problems. The adoption of CIFS as an official product has rectified this situation. Is CIFS/9000 based on SAMBA? Yes, very much so, although HP has augmented the software to support integration with PAM and Kerberos authentication as well as ONC AutoFS 2.3 (on HP-UX 11i version 2 not version 1) support. As of version 1.08, an HP-UX CIFS server can even act as a Primary Domain Controller, be a Browse Master , map Windows NT/XP/2000 Access Control Lists to UNIX permissions via HFS or VxFS ACLs, and provide NT printing support by uploading or downloading the necessary printer drivers from a Windows Server or client if necessary. CIFS is a protocol that supports remote file access. It was formerly known as SMB. Are CIFS and SMB the same? Yes, they are identical. In fact, Microsoft acknowledges that CIFS is simply a name change from SMB. The name change reflects the extent by which CIFS is now supported on other operating systems: UNIX, VMS, and MAC-OS to name a few. Whether we can ever consider it as a true Internet filesystem is a bit strong in my view, but the idea of operating system independence is a good one if not new; NFS was the de facto standard for file sharing on UNIX platforms for many years . The configuration files used on HP-UX are similar in format to other UNIX flavors, which makes life easier if you have configured CIFS/SAMBA on another version of UNIX. As you would expect, an HP-UX machine can act as a CIFS server, a CIFS client, or even both simultaneously . |
