Hello,

I am wondering what exactly is the difference between:
smbmount
mount.cifs
mount -t smbfs
mount -t cifs

I am asking because a NAS vendor supports 'mount -t smbfs'. Anyway I came across the other choices and would like to know of this is depend on the server (Samba, windows 2000&2003&2008 etc.) and what is exactly important to know about it.

mount -t cifs will call the mount.cifs program, and the same for smbmount / mount -t smbfs, so whilst they are related, the two, cifs & smbfs, have nothing in common when they are executed.

smbmount and 'mount -t smbfs' create the same resulting mount of a samba share. ('smbmount' is a Debian wrapper script which gets you to the business end of 'mount.smbfs').

mount.cifs allows you to mount the Windoze proprietary(?) shared filesystem.

So which command do I use for Samba usually?

I saw that both can be used!?

smbmount is NOT a debian script, it's a tool from the samba client package across many different distro's.

"mount -t smbfs" is not for mounting samba shares, it's for mounting Server Message Block filesystems, which is what Windows Network exports. Samba got it's name as a word containing the letters S M and B in that order.

CIFS *IS* SMB to all extents and purposes, or rather (AFAIK) the iteration of the code developed by Microsoft since 1996. From the Linux perspective, mount.cifs has simply superceded mount.cifs functionality over the last 18 months or so, and I would guess this is largely in line with M$ releasing the SMB2 standard as part of vista with a published API and added functionality, making a clean break more logical and feasible. From the perspective of a general user, they do the same job.

use the one that works. mount.smbfs is officially obsolete now though, and I would certainly never expect mount.cifs to not be 100% backwards compatible. If a NAS product (Which? ONtap an re-brands like Ibm NetFiler work well with both) says it privdes windows shares, then it's going to be striving to work as closely as possible to behave like windows. But then at the same time I think ONtap actually uses samba anyway.

cifs stands for the "common internet file system". It was defined by a consortium of companies that included Microsoft. It adds support for Unix permissions, including facls. Microsoft chose not to support it (their own standard!)but use the term. You want to use it for mounting samba shares and for newer kernels, the smbfs kernel driver is not available. The cifs driver will revert to the behavior of the smbfs driver if the server doesn't support the unix cifs extensions.