samba - Nov 2002 - ms dfs? What is it?

What is msdfs?  What can you do with it that you could not do without it?  

David

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 03:09:45PM -0500, David Shapiro
wrote:
> What is msdfs?  What can you do with it that you could not do without it?  
It's a "distributed filesystem" for Windows, allowing you to split
the
logical view of shares from the physical locations. You have one
top-level DFS share that can be mounted by 95 and newer clients (as far
as I know smbclient is not DFS-aware). Within that mounted drive you
have folders representing shares on any number of machines. When you
open one the appropriate share on the appropriate machine is
transparently accessed. It's sort of like mounting shares from several
servers at once, but only having one mounted drive to deal with. I think
MS-DFS also allows for failover and load balancing, one DFS link can
actually point to multiple servers.

I think DFS is mentioned in the Samba documentation, and I know MS has
it described on their web site. Both of those are probably better than
my bird's-eye description.

-- 
Michael Heironimus

Hi all,
>From: David Shapiro <David.Edward.Shapiro@bti.com>
>To: "'samba@lists.samba.org'"
<samba@lists.samba.org>
>Subject: [Samba] ms dfs?  What is it?
>Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 15:09:45 -0500
>
>What is msdfs?  What can you do with it that you could not do without it?  
>
Your first question has been well answered already on this list.

To answer your second, we use paths of the form:-

	\\net\software\antivirus
	\\net\software\msoffice
        \\net\users\homes

as permanent pathsnames in our setup and configuration of PCs.  Because
these are all DFS shae, each can point to a different (real) Samba
server share, and we can move and change those servers and shares without
having to reconfigure all our site's PCs.

Another good thing is that the (real) Samba servers don't even know
they're the target of the DFS link, because each client (having been
redirected to them by \\net) makes a direct connection in the normal
way.

One problem we have found, is that WinXP (and maybe others) only use the
original users's logon name when contacting the (real) Samba servers, so
'Connect As' is not an option.

The other problem is the Win95 only sees the DFS tree as an ordinary
share, unless you install the DFS client upgrade on to it. Not difficult
at all, but an annoyance.  Win98 and later have it built in.

One huge advantage of Samba over NT/2000 server is (AFAIK) that only
Samba can host multiple DFS trees (e.g. 'software', 'users') on
a single
machine. Windows is limited to one DFS tree per server (or domain).


                               Mac
          Assistant Systems Adminstrator @nibsc.ac.uk
                        dmccann@nibsc.ac.uk
   Work: +44 1707 641000 x285      Everything else: +44 7956 237670 (anytime)