HP CIFS Client Features

CIFS UNIX Extensions

CIFS UNIX Extensions enable the CIFS Client and Samba server to implement standard UNIX file system features. These include:

NTLM PAM Integration

NT LAN Manager (NTLM) is the default protocol by which CIFS clients are authenticated by CIFS servers. When used in conjunction with HP's NTLM Pluggable Authentication Module (PAM) and the HP CIFS Client, users who log in to an HP-UX system will have access automatically to CIFS-mounted file systems provided that PAM NTLM and the CIFS server are using the same database.

Kerberos Authentication: Integration with System Kerberos Cache

The CIFS Client supports the Kerberos authentication mechanism. Kerberos is a secure, industry-standard authentication protocol. It provides significant improvements over the older NTLM protocol traditionally used by CIFS Clients and Servers. The CIFS servers in your network must support Kerberos in order for you to take advantage of Kerberos support in the HP CIFS Client. Kerberos must be properly configured both on the HP-UX host on which the Client runs and on your network.

An additional feature is that the HP CIFS Client is integrated with the system Kerberos cache. If the HP-UX host uses PAM Kerberos or other Kerberos-aware programs that utilize the system Kerberos cache, such as kinit(1), the CIFS Client can utilize these cached credentials to provide automatic access to mounted CIFS servers without explicit user-initiated authentication for each server.

AutoFS 2.3 Support for HP CIFS Client

The AutoFS is a service which is part of the HP ONC product set that automatically mounts or unmounts filesystems with near- transparency to the end users. The latest version of AutoFS 2.3 supports the mount and unmount of the HP CIFS Client mounted filesystems. AutoFS 2.3 can automatically perform direct and indirect mounts of the HP CIFS filesystems. AutoFS 2.3 only supports the HP CIFS Client with direct and indirect map files, it doesn’t support CIFS Client with special or executable map files, or with multiple (replicated) servers.

In order to provide HP CIFS Client AutoFS support, AutoFS 2.3 must be installed and configured on the system. For detailed information on installing and configuring AutoFS, please refer to “Configuring and Administering AutoFS” in NFS Services Administrator’s Guide on HP-UX at http://www.docs.hp.com.

	NOTE: AutoFS 2.3 support for HP CIFS Client applies only to HP-UX 11i version 2. AutoFS doesn’t support HP CIFS Client on HP-UX release 11.0 and 11i version 1.

Support for Internationalized Clients

The CIFS Client is designed to work with a variety of internationalized clients and servers. It can use Unicode to transmit multi-byte characters on the network, or any of several character encoding tables located in /etc/opt/cifsclient/unitables. See the README file in that directory for an index of the tables.