[Samba] Linux to Windows Dfs

[Urban Widmark]

On Tue, 21 May 2002, Warwick Bruce Chapman wrote:

> # mount -t smbfs //server/share$/home/pupils/user /mnt/point -o username=user
> 
> Trying to mount any share within the Dfs root retruns:
> 
> 23479: tree connect failed: ERRDOS - ERRnosuchshare (You specified an invalid 
> share name)
> SMB connection failed
> 
> Help...?

You can't currently mount a directory below the share level. It wouldn't
be that hard to support it but it's never been requested before.


However, smbfs doesn't support dfs either so even with "submounts" I
think you would run into trouble. (As I understand the dfs parts of smb
the clients need to understand it and send requests to the right servers)


I think the way to support it is simply a matter of recognising the error
message that means "this directory lives on a different server" and then
do a mount of that inside the kernel.

It could work like this. You'd mount //server/share$, but since that
contains dfs the kernel smbfs would automatically mount other servers on
various directories. The end result could be a series of mounts like this:

/mnt/point		->	//server/share$
/mnt/point/home		->	//server2/homes
/mnt/point/home/pupils	->	//pupilserver/homes

For now you'll have to mount directly from the server that exports the
different dfs things (I don't know if that is even possible). So to get
"//server/share$/home/pupils/user" on /mnt/point you'd do:

mount -t smbfs //pupilserver/user$ /mnt/point -o ...

Which sucks if you have a lot of different servers handling different
users.


I think I know how to support dfs, but I don't really need it. If I get
around to implementing this it will be against the samba dfs support as I
don't have access to any windows systems using dfs.
(anyone that knows the relative quality of the samba dfs support?)

/Urban