[Samba] Understanding internal DNS usage on Samba 4

Lou lou at matrix42.xyz
Thu Mar 25 22:07:58 UTC 2021


Hello,

I'm currently studying migration from Samba 3 to Samba 4 (NT4 to AD).  Using classic upgrade [1].

Currently (alongside with our Samba 3 PDC), we have a heterogeus environment with external DNS servers:

ns1.example.com
ns2.example.com
ns3.example.com
ns4.example.com

Currently, our DHCP server supplies the IPs of these servers for clients.  We have all servers (and PDC) correctly registered on these servers. They are four so we can keep up with the load and for geographic reasons.

Why, in Samba 4, are clients required to use Samba DNS resolver?

It seems Samba 4 uses DNS while Samba 3 does not, and requires that all clients to use it, but that would break our architecture because there would be a single point of failure (unless we setup more than one PDC).

We can configure the PDC to forward queries to them with smb.conf option "dns forwarder" [2] and use several PDC to mimic the architecture we have today, but I was wondering why are clients required to use Samba 4 DNS.

There are some discussion about this in the list (like [3]), if there is any documentation/thread about that, could you share?

Thanks!

[1] https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Migrating_a_Samba_NT4_Domain_to_Samba_AD_(Classic_Upgrade)
[2] https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/smb.conf.5.html
[3] http://samba.2283325.n4.nabble.com/Samba4-using-existing-DNS-and-LDAP-td4652082.html



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