CIFS is a stateful service. What maintains a history of connection activities?

If only the server maintained state, the client would have no awareness of its own connection status or previously opened files, leading to communication failures or inefficiencies.

While applications use CIFS, the protocol state itself is maintained at the client and server operating system levels, not solely by the application layer.

In a stateful protocol like CIFS, both the client and the server must maintain state information, including active sessions, open file handles, and locks, to ensure proper and continuous communication for file sharing.

A domain controller is primarily used for authentication and authorization in a Windows domain, not for maintaining the session state of CIFS connections between clients and file servers.