[PATCH] DFS referral shuffling

[David Disseldorp]

On Tue, 24 Feb 2015 19:37:13 +0000, Robin McCorkell wrote:

> Actually, referral shuffling is mentioned in the spec, [MS-DFSC] 3.2.1.1:
> 
> > The DFS server places the target servers in the referral response in
> the following order:
> > - Targets in the same site as the client are listed at the top of the
> referral response in random order.
> > - Targets outside the client's site are appended to the response in
> random order.

Yep, this makes it pretty clear that the server is responsible for
guiding the client with a referral list optimised for load balancing and
locality.

> Besides, implementing referral shuffling on the server side makes the
> admin's life much easier - load balancing is guaranteed by the server
> configuration, rather than relying on updated clients. But I agree: the
> clients should perform heuristics to determine the best server to
> connect to, rather than blindly picking the first one that works.

FWIW, this behaviour (bug 10123) was recently changed so that smbclient
now uses a cached connection if present, before fallback to the top
entry in the referrals list.

Cheers, David
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