[Samba] ms dfs? What is it?

[Michael Heironimus]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 03:09:45PM -0500, David Shapiro wrote:
> What is msdfs?  What can you do with it that you could not do without it?  

It's a "distributed filesystem" for Windows, allowing you to split the
logical view of shares from the physical locations. You have one
top-level DFS share that can be mounted by 95 and newer clients (as far
as I know smbclient is not DFS-aware). Within that mounted drive you
have folders representing shares on any number of machines. When you
open one the appropriate share on the appropriate machine is
transparently accessed. It's sort of like mounting shares from several
servers at once, but only having one mounted drive to deal with. I think
MS-DFS also allows for failover and load balancing, one DFS link can
actually point to multiple servers.

I think DFS is mentioned in the Samba documentation, and I know MS has
it described on their web site. Both of those are probably better than
my bird's-eye description.

-- 
Michael Heironimus