Questions re: Samba MS-Dfs support

[Jay Ts]

Hi,

I have set up two Samba Dfs servers here (using Samba 2.2.3a, on
Red Hat 7.1) for documenting Samba's Dfs support in Using Samba.
I am seeing some odd behavior, and I have three questions:

1. a Windows 98 system is sharing a folder, which has a symlink in
  the Samba Dfs tree.  When trying to access its own share through
  the Dfs tree, the Win 98 client gets an error dialog:

  	\\Toltec\dfs\audio is not accessible

		File system error (2106).

  This happens here for both of two folders shared by the Win98 system,
  and it can access all other Dfs shares with no problem.  Further
  experimentation showed that other Win 95/98/Me clients received
  errors on the two folders as well, but not all the time.  Occasionally,
  a client can connect.  It works ok using either Windows 2000 or Windows
  XP as a client.  I tried switching the shares to user-level security,
  and the error message is different, but the behavior is otherwise
  similar.  (BTW, this is in a domain environment with a Samba PDC
  that is also hosting the Dfs root.  Another Samba server has a similar
  Dfs tree, and the behavior is similar when accessing the troublesome
  shares through it instead of the PDC.)

  Is this a bug?

2. smbclient can connect to the dfs root, but attempts to cd to
  any of the remote shares results in the error message

	cd \<dir\: NT_STATUS_OBJECT_PATH_NOT_FOUND

  (This happened when I ran smbclient from the dfs host, and
  also from another Samba server.)

  Is smbclient supposed to work with dfs?

3. The htmldoc on setting up dfs shows a symlink created like this:

	ln -s msdfs:serverB\\share,serverC\\share linkb

  I *assume* this means that linkb is pointing to two identical
  read-only shares (one on serverB and one on serverC), and that
  Samba will divide the load evenly between them, as a MS Dfs
  server would.  Is this correct?

  And if so, how is the load divided?  Some experimentation here
  indicates that when a client first connects to the share, Samba
  picks one of the two servers, and after that point, the other
  server is not used for that client.  Correct?  Is there any limitation
  on the number of load-sharing servers that can be used?

Jay Ts
jayts at iname.com