This book gathers together and presents-in a readable, accessible form- the arcane knowledge of the Samba Team in understanding the CIFS protocol. The content is based on years of experience asking and answering questions on the Samba Technical and jCIFS Developer's mailing lists, as well as countless hours spent pouring over obscure documentation, packet traces, and source code. The approach is layered with basic concepts first introduced and then discussed before drilling down into the actual workings and internals. The goal is to help the reader, no matter what platform they are working in, develop an understanding of the protocols, and to act as a guide to the more detailed specifications and technical references that are available.The large installed base of Windows systems has granted de facto standard status to the CIFS (Microsoft's filesharing system) protocol suite. It lets programs make requests for files and services on remote computers on the Internet. Unfortunately, implementation documentation and detailed protocol specs are scarce, incomplete, or inconsistent. This is a problem both for network administrators and third-party CIFS implementors and so the need for this book is clear.Samba is an Open Source CIFS server that ships with most distributions of Linux and several commercial UNIX flavors. JCIFS is an SMB/CIFS implementation in Java.