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

[John Drescher]

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Bruce Richardson <itsbruce at workshy.org> wrote:
> 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,

I am using a samba ldap domain.

> 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.
>

Have you tried using the real ip address in the links? I switched to
that years ago to allow cifs-msdfs links without a dns server. I am
not sure if that had any effect on XP clients though.

fileserv network_dfs_root # ls -al
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 6 Administrator Domain Users 4096 Feb  2  2010 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 Administrator root         4096 Apr 30  2008 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 Administrator root           31 Oct 21  2009 DataAnalysis
-> msdfs:192.168.1.33\DataAnalysis
drwxr-xr-x 2 Administrator Domain Users 4096 Aug 20  2009 SystemLinks
lrwxrwxrwx 1 Administrator root           26 Oct 27  2009 Testing ->
msdfs:192.168.1.32\Testing
drwxr-xr-x 4 Administrator root         4096 Apr 30  2008 Users
drwxr-xr-x 4 Administrator Domain Users 4096 Apr 30  2008 images
drwxr-xr-x 3 Administrator Domain Users 4096 Feb  2  2010 other

John