[Samba] DFS, WAN links and file syncing

[Michael St. Laurent]

I'm working on solving an interesting problem.  We've got some folks on
the other side of a WAN link who are complaining about the very long
load time they have for the really big files located on my server.
There *is* a linux system on their side of the WAN connection with Samba
already installed and it occurred to me that maybe a DFS setup would be
helpful.

Having never messed with DFS before I set out to research what it did
and discovered that it doesn't do anything about keeping the respective
files in sync.  That would be a problem.

What I'd like to set up is a share on both servers that are somehow kept
in sync so that folks can modify files on either one and have the
changes reflected on the other.  In fact, I would really like to see
file locks work across servers so that nobody could modify the file on
system A if someone on system B is already editing it.  Then set up the
DFS tree so that the client systems go to the closest server for file
access.

Any advice?  ;)