[linux-cifs-client] CIFS client and DFS roadmap

[Ángel Galindo Muñoz]

	Hi!

	I just need a confirmation. I want to access samba DFS shares from my 
GNU/Linux clients. I've been reading mails froms the list, surfing the 
web and doing tests and it seems that you still need to pass the "ip" 
parameter to the mount.cifs command in order to mount a DFS share.

	I've tested with latest versions and certainly, if you do "mount.cifs 
... -o ip=x.y.z.t. ..." then you can reach the bottom share (where 
x.y.z.t is the IP address of the destination share).

	Of course, this lacks one of the DFS goodies : that the final 
destination is transparent for the client. By now you need to know the 
IP address of the destination UNC and this doesn't let me change the 
destination without having to change the client's /etc/fstab, autofs map 
or whatever. This is unacceptable in a production environment with 
thousands of clients.

	So, nowadays the only way to connect transparently to a DFS share from 
Linux is latest smbclient version. At least, 3.0.10 can't and 3.0.14a can.


	Is it ok? Am I wrong? More over, if that's ok then are there future 
plans to solve it?

	Of course that we can also do the work with Samba without DFS, but 
we're planning a huge SMB fileserver and this could lead us to take 
different decisions in this early stage.

	Thanks everybody in advance and congratulations for your hard work. Bye!





	Excerpt from a mail of Jerry at "samba" list:

Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Peter Weiss wrote:
> | hello,
> |
> | maybe this is the wrong place, but according to
> |
> |     http://us1.samba.org/samba/Linux_CIFS_client.html
> |
> | linux kernel cifs should be able to handle M$ dfs shares.
> | I looked at the installation and usage instructions
> | but it doesn't work. On the mount.cifs manpage I
> | found no hint about a special switch to activate dfs parsing.
> |
> | Can anybody put some light into this?
> 
> It's not implemented last time I spoke with Steve.
> The cifs fs has its own list btw.....linux-cifs-client at samba.org
> (you can subscribe from the mailman interface at
> http://lists.samba.org/)
> 
> 
> cheers, jerry

-- 
Angel Galindo Muñoz
University of Barcelona, Spain