CIFS stands for Common Internet File System. This is application-level network protocol mainly used to provide shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes. You can access CIFS share from Linux and mount them as a regular filesystem. This is handy if there is a backup service like Infrascale where you set up a windows computer to be backed up. As there is no linux application for infrascale.

The following example values will be used in this example:

IP address for the server: 192.168.1.104
Share name on Windows Server: C:\backuptemp
User name: testuser
Domain: testdomain
Mount point on Linux Server: /mnt/winmount

The environment is a Windows Domain with Active Directory. There is a file share set up as C:\backuptemp

Make the local mount point on the linux server:

# mkdir mnt/winmount

To mount the network share, use the following command and enter the password of the user:

# mount -t cifs //192.168.1.104/backuptemp /mnt/winmount -o user=testuser