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Most people, when they use either SMB or CIFS, are talking about the same exact thing. The two are interchangeable not only in discussion, but also in application – i.e., a client speaking CIFS can talk to a server speaking SMB and vice versa. Why? Because CIFS is a form of SMB
SMB stands for “Server Message Block.” It’s a file sharing protocol that was invented by IBM and has been around since the mid-eighties. It was designed to allow computers to read and write files to a remote host over a local area network (LAN). The directories on the remote hosts made available via SMB are called “shares.”
CIFS stands for “Common Internet File System.” CIFS is a dialect of SMB. That is, CIFS is a particular implementation of the Server Message Block protocol, created by Microsoft.
