[Samba] DFS root only works for more recent Windows clients

[Bruce Richardson]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 09:14:39AM -0400, John Drescher wrote:
> 
> Its working for me for years at work with (xp, xp64, and now windows7
> 64 bit). I as of a few months I am running samba-3.5.8 on the dfs root
> however I had 3.0.37 installed up until recently.
> 
> Did you reboot the xp clients after enabling the dfs root?

Yes.  I have been rebooting windows workstations and laptops with every
test, tweak and configuration change since I started testing DFS.  It
makes no difference (and I've tested both 3.0.x and 3.5.x on the server
side, as well).  There seems to be some policy setting on WinXP and 2003
which is blocking their access, something which is different on Vista,
2008 and Win7.

There was a brief thread about this issue back in January which suggests
that a recent security update may be to blame.

There may be some difference between our set-up (LDAP-backed Samba 3.x
domain) and yours, but the guys who reported the issue in January are
both running their samba servers within Active Directory domains, so
they aren't identical set-ups to ours.

I can use the DFS admin tool on a Windows XP box to examine the DFS root
and its links.  It happily verifies the status of the links and the
shares they point to.  But any attempt to open the links gives me
"\\Apps01\files\link refers to a location that is unavailable".
Frustratingly, Windows XP doesn't log anything at all about this.


-- 
Bruce

Get thee behind me, Stan: for it is written, thou hast gotten me into
another fine mess.  -- Oliver 4:8