Network Filesystems?

[MrSparkle]

I'm reading the Ubuntu Bible and it explained that file systems are just harddrives or partitions that are formatted in a certain way like a NTFS file system or a Ext3 file system.

A little further on they talk about protocols such as SMB aka CIFS and NFS and call them file systems. How are they file systems? Is network file system just a misnomer for network protocol?

I also noticed that when your mounting a network drive you have to use the "specify filesystem" command -t before you write the network protocol i.e. "mount -t smb smb://host/share mountpoint".

I can't understand how the hell smb and nfs are considered file systems when they're only protocols used for networking.

[Prometheum]

Well, file system can be used as a noun to describe a specific formatted file system, as in "My /home filesystem is fucked up" or "mount this network file system". Also, the network filesystems are file systems in that they're just like a normal file system, but instead of disc I/O, there's network I/O, and you don't see what the data is actually hosted on, so to you, it's just smb/cifs/NFS/whatever.