[Samba] Can I update our CIFS kernel module to support SMB 2.1/3 in RHEL/CentOS 6.x?

[DW LNDeveloper]

Thanks for the feedback. It does seem to be problematic to recompile the newer code against the older kernel code. I assumed most or all of the kernel APIs used by Samba would have been the same, but hadn't thought about changes to debugging calls. Also, upgrading only the kernel to a new major version without recompiling the myriad packages sitting on top could have similar results.

After sending my original post, I discovered my company had already deployed some CentOS 7 servers in a cloud farm. This makes it much easier to request additional hosts for this project, so it looks like we'll be taking the full upgrade route.


On Jul 24, 2017, at 2:01 PM, DW LNDeveloper <lndevdw at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,
At my company we run server farms based on RHEL/CentOS 6.x and are nowhere near our EOL on those servers yet.  So upgrading them to run RHEL/CentOS 7 in order to gain SMB 2/3 support (since SMB 1 has recently been disabled) is a difficult path for us to take at the present time.

Is it possible to acquire an updated cifs.ko kernel driver that supports SMB 2.1+ or 3 and install and use that module with our existing RHEL/CentOS 6.x server installations?