[Samba] Dfs - Load Balancing

[brian at krusic.com]

Hi,

I've also an interest in Dfs and plan implementation once I 
have sufccessfully gone to Samba 3.

>1) How does it load balance?  Is it some sort of round robin?
No, its more like autofs using NFS with sym links in the Unix 
world.

What I mean is that you can spread various data over several 
unique volumes and have them appear under the same dir 
structure.  This not only simplifies data management 
in "where are my files again" but it also allows you to 
spread network and disk i/o over several points.  Another 
advantage is that maintanance can be performend on a 
particular data location (ie; Raid) without affecting the 
entire directory or job structure.

All this is very old skewl stuff in the Unix world but is 
kinda new in the Windows world.

One thing to keep in mind is that the initial data request 
goes through the Dfs server in order to establish the mount 
point or network path but after that, subsequent requests go 
directly to that server bypassing the Dfs server.

As for the rest of your Q's, test and document your results.

Bri-