How are CIFS and SMB related to each other?

Question

Are they synonyms, or components of a protocol stack? Answers with proof links are welcome.

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 01 '12 at 13:54

5

answered Mar 01 '12 at 13:54

user9517

from the first link it appears that SMB to CIFS is like SUN-RPC for NFS; while the second one puts them in a row. What do I miss? – yrk Mar 01 '12 at 14:05

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 01 '12 at 14:03

3

They're pretty much the same.

According to Wikipedia, they are the same.

According to Microsoft, CIFS is a dialect of SMB.

answered Mar 01 '12 at 14:03

T. Fabre

Thanks. It appears CIFS is a specialisation of SMB, just like RDP is a narrow specialisation of GSS/MCS stack (T.120). Is it close? – yrk Mar 01 '12 at 14:11
[MS-SMB](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc246232(v=prot.10).aspx) puts them another way: SMB is an extention of CIFS... so where's the truth? – yrk Mar 01 '12 at 14:18
2

The truth is most likely [here](http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-heizer-cifs-v1-spec-00) :) Which is that CIFS is "based on SMB". – T. Fabre Mar 01 '12 at 14:26
Or even better, [here](http://ubiqx.org/cifs/rfc-draft/index.html) or [there](http://www.cifs.org) – T. Fabre Mar 01 '12 at 14:34
seems that the path is SMB->CIFS->SMB1.0->... Thanks. – yrk Mar 01 '12 at 14:35

2 Answers2