[jcifs] RE: FW: Connecting to DFS Roots

[Michael B Allen]

Daniel Palmer said:
> Just been doing some reading to help with my own understanding.
>
> OK - windows has a UNC path.  First thing it does with it is pass it to
> MUP.  What I found interesting is the first thing MUP does with the path
> (at least according to http://www.zacker.com/articles/mup/mup.html) is
> to check if it is a DFS share.  It doesn't even try to connect to the
> server / share using the Windows Networking redirector.    I just found
> it interesting that DFS is the first port of call - and it seems that
> jCIFS does the opposite (try connecting as a normal server.  If no good
> try DFS).
>
> I could be way off base here - I've only been playing packet sniffer for
> about a day ;)

At some point the client must discover that a path is "in dfs". Once it
does it gets a "referral" and puts the path and the referral path into a
map. From that point on, whenever the client tries to access a path it
first checks the map. JCIFS and I'm sure all other DFS capable clients
behave the same way.

I don't think the documentation you founds is what your looking for. I
think Microsofts website is a better bet:

http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsServer2003/technologies/fileandprint/file/dfs/default.mspx

Your captures did not show the discovery process. But I noticed some IPs
have changed. In one capture the ip for trinity.local and shadrach are the
same. I think the paths you're interested in are in a DFS cluster. It is
not a vanilla DFS redirect. There is more going on.

Unfortunately, whatever the case is I cannot fix it. The 1.x branch is
locked down. There has to be a pretty serious bug (security flaw) for me
to do a release at this point and I consider this problem to be a feature
enhancement.

I would very much like to hear about what you find. There's always 2.0. If
you're good with Java you could probably make it work without too much
trouble provided you can answer those 3 questions I posed.

Mike