samba - Apr 2004 - Some basic questions about accessing DFS/DCE shares with SAMBA 3.0

Hi Guys-

We are a group involved in a project to move an application from Windows
to AIX, and part of the application involves reading OSF DFS shares, and
making the filesystem available to Windows machines through SAMBA. The
conversion of the application has gone well, but it is our first time
using SAMBA and I have some questions that hopefully are not too dumb,
and if they are, we would gladly appreciate being pointed to any HOWTO's
(not that we didn't look for them!) that would explain how to get around
our current problems.

We installed SAMBA 3.0, and we can see it is working in the sense we can
see shares available through our remaining windows boxes, so we know
we're at least doing something right!

Our questions are:

1) We had made the assumption that SAMBA 3.0 would be able to read the
OSF DFS file shares, and make them available as a Windows file share. In
effect, it would be a go-between with the two file systems. Are we
correct? We can find all kinds of documentation hinting at this but no
documentation that spells it out for us (probably too obvious for SAMBA
old-timers, but we're just going back to basics in making sure we're
operating under the correct assuptions).

2) If question #1 is correct, is there any special configuration,
compilation, or invokations we need to do to make SAMBA use the DCE/DFS
credentials? For example, on AIX, when we want to use a DFS/DCE file
share, we use this command:

dce_login dfsuser abc123

(the principal is 'dfsuser', the password 'abc123')

and then the directory /.../remoteoffice.ourcompany.com/fs

is available to us to work with.

When we log in, the DCE principal and password gives us a "invalid
password" error, although our regular AIX logins work splendidly (we
only get the default permissions available to our logins, which is to
browse but not write). Is there a special way to get SAMBA to use the
DFS shares using DCE credentials?


Any hints on what to watch for in the logs and so on would be
appreciated!

-Derrick

(pancakeshead     at      yahoo      dot      com)

Here is our complete smb.conf file, just in case there are errors in it
that sharp eyes can spot (we connect to the share 'dfssb'):

[global]
   guest account = guest
   log file = /tmp/samba1.log %m
   log level = 8
   password level = 8

[homes]
   comment = Home Directories
   browsable = no
   read only = no
   create mode = 0750

[namespace]
   comment = DCE - DFS Global Root
   path = /...
   public = no
   writable = yes

[dfssb]
   comment = Corporate Cell
   path = /.../neregion.ourcompany.com/fs
   browseable = no
   read only = no



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