Samba4 and AD sites.

[Matthieu Patou]

On 27/05/2011 09:34, Pavel Herrmann wrote:
> On Friday 27 of May 2011 04:02:38 brendan powers wrote:
>>> as for the nearest DC selection, that is work of the client (based on DNS
>>> and its IP address)
>>>
>> Does this mean that I do not need to configure sites for the clients
>> to pick the nearest domain controller? The links between the sites are
>> fast enough that I'm not worried about replication traffic. So, if I
>> can get away with not configuring sites, that would be preferred.
So you don't need to configure clients but you still need to configure 
sites.
If you don't configure sites at all clients will be by default attached 
to the "default first site" and as all your DC will be there then 
clients can/will pick a random DC so you can end with a client from 
Moscow talking to a server in Sydney ...



> no, it does not
>
> AFAIK the client uses its IP address to determine its site (whis needs an AD
> lookup, not sure which server it chooses at this point), and then uses DNS to
> ask which is the ldap/kerberos/etc server for the site (round-robin should
> happen here, for some degree of load balancing)

Not exactly, it's mostly the server that has the knowledge of sites and 
IP range and so can understand on which site the client is connected or 
is the closest and so decide which DCs are the closest.
There is also RPC where the client can ask what is the best site for it 
and so get informed of which is the closest.


Matthieu.




-- 
Matthieu Patou
Samba Team        http://samba.org
Private repo      http://git.samba.org/?p=mat/samba.git;a=summary