[Samba] MS DFS and File Replication

[alex]

Hi
 
I've no idea if anyone can help with this, or if it's even a good idea,
but I'll give it a go..........
 
I've been charged with providing a level of fail-over with a Samba
implementation, and without going down the shared storage/cluster
approach it was suggested that we consider using the File Replication
Service in Win2k to mirror a complete share tree from the primary SMB
server to the failover SMB server (effectively a hot standby, no load
balancing or AA clustering required).
 
The problem we've come accross is that once the DFS root has been
created (hosted by a Win2k server), the primary SMB server can be added
as a 'link' to the root (and the failover) (and the DFS link opened
through a DFS client), however, when an attempt is made to configure the
replication between the two links (rather the point of the whole
exercise), Win2k is reporting that 'the RPC server is
unavailable'...........and simply refuses to allow replication to be
configured between the two SMB servers.
 
I guess I'd like to ask, has anybody attempted this before and got it
working ?
 
All we really require is the ability to replicate a tree structure from
one SMB server to another in effectively real-time, and the above
approach would be sufficient.  I realise that there are almost certainly
other approaches that would be faster and didn't involve Win2k servers,
however my Linux knowledge is limited (though greatly improved in the
last few months).
 
Currently i'm building with Mandrake v9 and the SMB rpms that ship with
said distribution.  The file system for the SMB shares is XFS with ACL
support enabled (I believe some replication daemons don't function with
XFS hence the mentioning)
 
Any suggestions welcome
 
Regards
 
Alex Robinson
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