Downfalls of the CIFS
The prospects for Microsoft’s CIFS proposal looked bright early on. Microsoft wanted to standardize SMB with CIFS. One of its advantages was that it directly faced communications over the TCP port 445, without going through NetBIOS at all. Despite this capability, in practice most CIFS clients and servers still used NetBIOS and LAN Manager (LanMan) authentication.
The original purpose of LAN Manager 1.0 was to provide support for a range of file system and operating-system functions within IBM’s OS/2 platform environment. Later incarnations of LAN Manager also included Microsoft DOS and Windows. NT LAN Manager, or NTLM (also called NT LanMan 0.12), was originally the core specification for CIFS (common Internet file system).
Eventually, CIFS fell into disuse as Microsoft developed newer SMB protocols. Today’s version is 3.0.
Common Internet File System in OS
The Common Internet File System (CIFS) is an important piece of software that helps operating systems share files and communicate with one another in the network. CIFS, or server message block (SMB), developed by Microsoft, is a standardized protocol for sharing files on the network. In this article, we will discuss the operation of CIFS, its development, and applications to various operating systems.