[Samba] msdfs root / directory structure.

[Mac]

>From: "John Drescher" <drescherjm at gmail.com>
>To: "Samba Maillist" <samba at lists.samba.org>
>Subject: [Samba] msdfs root / directory structure.
>
>>From the docs I do not see a mention of this and in the past it did
>not work for me however with samba-3.0.28 it appears to be working.


I've done this for a few years with various versions of Samba 3, never
noticed it it not working.


>Is this guaranteed to work? Known limitations? I am interested in XP,
>win2k3 and possibly linux cifs clients in the future.


We're mostly an XP shop (for desktop) and it seems to behave itself.
The usual DFS problems can occur, but the extra levels of sub-directories
don't cause extra problems.

The other thing that Samba can do that I've not seen Windows Server do
is allow you to have multiple shares, each set up as a DFS root. So we
have  (something like)  :-

	\\net
		\user
			\homes
			\mydocs
		\shares
			\finance
				\budgets
			\admin
				\meetings
			\it
				\devel-team
				\support-desk
		\software
			\microsoft
				\office
				\visio
			\adobe
				\reader8
				\illustrator


where 'net' is in fact a NetBios alias.

'user', 'shares', and 'software' are three different Samba shares, each
with DFS turned on. (i.e. DFS roots)

'homes','mydocs','finance' etc. are all normal subdirectories.

'budgets','meetings','office' etc are the DFS (sym-)links.


Works nicely for us.

(and somewhere we have a script to build the whole 'shares' tree by
parsing smb.conf files from across the whole site)



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