[Samba] How to set up a multi-subnet Samba network

[Alex Dawson]

At 7:14 PM -0500 1/3/02, Bill Moran wrote:
>and (believe it or not) this is just
>too much work for folks.

Heh! Know that one :)

>Additionally, persistent network connections to other servers do
>not work at all.
>We're considering putting all the servers in the same domain and
>setting up a PDC/BDC system.  The only concern is the network
>traffic this will cause across the wireless links when people log in.
>(Windows always tries to log into the PDC first, correct?)

No, windows uses the BDC for authentication last I checked. The idea 
being that there are multiple BDCs for each domain, so that people 
can authenticate to them, and load them thru the roof if need be, 
while the fileserver stays on the PDC and can respond to file 
requests with the minimum of system overhead.

>So ... first off, does anyone have any comments on pros/cons of this
>approach?

Yes, samba 2.2.3a doesn't support either replicating to Windows BDCs 
or Samba BDCs. The recommended way of doing it is to have multiple 
machines running samba, using the same synced userlist, and work out 
some way to load share. There is a page in .es (sorry for being 
vauge) which has an explaination of how to do this.

>Does anyone have a better approach?
>Does anyone know how much traffic results from a network login?

I would personally run it as one domain, and see what happens from there.
-- 
Alex Dawson                                    CSU - Systems Administrator
     +-------------------+------------------------------------------------+
    /Tel: (08) 9380 1587/           Electrical and Electronic Engineering/
   /Fax: (08) 9380 1065/                 University of Western Australia/
  /alex at ee.uwa.edu.au /                  http://www.ee.uwa.edu.au/~alex/
+-------------------+------------------------------------------------+

The following line brought to you by the ESOS Act 2000, section 107:
"CRICOS Provider Code: 00126G"