[Samba] load balancing CIFS/Samba

[James Bagley Jr]

Blue,

It's been a while since i've worked with it, but I thought Windows would
fall back to broadcasting for netbios names only uses dns if the broadcast
fails.

The resolution order is something like (assuming an H-node):

	Check to see if it is the local machine name.
	Try the WINS Server
	Try broadcasting
	Check the LMHOSTS file
	Try the HOSTS file and then DNS

I suppose you could try killing 'nmbd' (the netbios name resolver) on the
samba servers to force the netbios name broadcast to fail and the clients
to fall back on DNS names.  This seems an awfull lot like a hack to me,
but could feasibly work in some warped fashion.

Even if it does work, your clients will have a long timeout period while
they flood your network with broadcast traffic before falling back to DNS.


--
James Bagley			|           CDI Innovantage
james_bagley at non.agilent.com	| Technical Computing UNIX Admin Support
   DON'T PANIC			|       Agilent Technologies IT
Phone: (541) 738-3340		|          Corvallis, Oregon
--

On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Blue Lang wrote:

> On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, James Bagley Jr wrote:
>
> >
> > Does windows even use DNS for SMB file-sharing?  I'm thinking it doesn't.
>
> it can definately fall back to using it for hostname resolution at
> 'mount' time. if you're running without WINS, you need DNS.
>
> > The only way that I can think of to load-balance samba servers is to use a
> > NAT box with a server pool on a private subnet behind it.  This way, all
> > your requests are handled by a single ip/hostname and the load balancing
> > is done by the NAT box via netfilter or some such.  I haven't actually
> > tried this, but it should work...  ;-)
>
> i think you are correct, but i am trying to examine other possibilities
> first.
>
> --
> blue
>