I'd like to compile a CIFS module for my fedora linux in order to access Win2003 DC shares, but as far as I know the kernel has to be patched and recompiled. my question is:
is it possible to compile just the module and do some insmod without recompile the whole kernel? for ntfs module I've found a precompiled module packed in rpm via apt-get and it worked well... so i presume some modules can just be added instead to be compiled with the whole kernel.
thanks a lot
nicolax

Welcome to LQ Nicolax.

You want to make a kernel level 'driver' to access a network share? You don't need one. When you share something in Windows, you share it using a pseudo filesystem called SMB (or CIFS as Microsoft want to call it now). It doesn't matter whether the share resides on a FAT32 or NTFS partition, so long as Windows can recognise the filesystem it will share it all the same with SMB. Therefore, your client machine doesn't need to know if the file is actually on an NTFS or FAT32 partition, only that it is a valid SMB share.

Now onto where Linux fits into this. You can, indeed, get an NTFS module for the Linux kernel. This is used when a local harddrive contains an NTFS filesystem. But we are talking about network shares, are we not? Think about this - if you are trying to access a Windows network share, do you need to know what filesystem the files resides? Surely you only need to know that it is a valid SMB share?

The long and short: You do not need a SMB/CIFS or even an NTFS module in order to access files shared over a network. You need SAMBA. Almost all distros include SAMBA by default, if not, it's not hard to get. If you're trying to mount a remote share, then it isn't hard to use - it works very much like MOUNT does. If, however, you are trying to create a share that Windows machines can access, it is a bit harder.

So, go and check out SAMBA.

Good luck.

thanks, I know that, but as you may notice I didn't have problems with samba that works really fine, my problems are around windows 2003 server when it is also a Domain controller. in fact i usually use samba in order to map SMB shares, but windows 2003 uses SMB_SIGNING that is not compulsory in SMB protocol. so in order to mount SMB shares exported from that OS samba.org suggest to use the CIFS module in order to use mount.cifs. fedora do not use CIFS in the kernel tree, which has to be patched and recompiled...
so the question:
i do not want to recompile 100+ kernels in order to use windows 2003 server, i'd like to have a pre-compiled module to be installed by insmod... so can I just compile a module against a kernel version and not all the kernel??
thanks for your reply
nicolax