[Samba] Domain DFS on samba 4

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sun, 2012-10-28 at 12:46 -0400, Ludovic Rouse-Lamarre wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Our company currently stores its data on centralized samba servers which 
> causes performance problems for remote office employees. We are thinking 
> of decentralizing the data with NAS in each office and synchronizing all 
> the NAS on our central domain controller with MSDFS. I have heard this 
> can be done in real time with Windows and Active Directory.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_File_System_(Microsoft) 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_File_System_%28Microsoft%29>
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc782417.aspx
> 
> The physical location of the data becomes transparent to the end user. 
> The DFS path formed with the domain name remains \\DOMAINNAME\share123 
> which points the client to the storage device which is physically 
> closest to him (the local NAS), thus eliminating the latency problems 
> and simplifying the paths to our servers.
> 
> We are currently running a Samba domain and we tend toward open source 
> solutions but this is something we need. From what I understand Samba 3 
> cannot run domain DFS because it requires Active Directory. I would like 
> to know if this will be possible with Samba 4?

If you just want to redirect one share from a common name to somewhere
else, then you don't need domain DFS, normal MSDFS will do.

You wouldn't use the domain name, but just another server (fs.domain.com
for example) and then point back the shares to the office you wish to
actually host the data.  There is documentation on DFS in the Samba
HOWTO.

Naturally, the data will only be in one spot, but if it's the right
spot, that shouldn't be an issue.  You can then move it around without
breaking things, but just changing who pays the latency penalty. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org