Cifs will not mount a DFS share by using DFS "hostname"

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Dear community,

We have RHEL 5.7 server that needs to mount a MS Windows DFS share via hostname of the DFS pool. This fails.

I can mount the share via an indiviual ip-address.

If I run host command on the hostname I get about 60 responses and a warning:
;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.

Has anyone been able to use CIFS mount on a DFS share on RHEL 5.7, if so what rpms did you install and what specific configuration did you use?

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

P.S. in parallel Red Hat support is working on this issue too, but have not found a solution.

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture
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Responses

Th Guru 2987 points
20 November 2013 10:29 PM

The CIFS modules in RHEL 5 are fairly old. For DFS compatibility, you'd need to patch the new CIFS modules into your kernel and update the relevant CIFS utils.

According to the CERN site, you'd probably need kernel 2.6.38+ and CIFS-utils 4.8.1+. RHEL 6.4 probably has the capability (and RHEL 5.10 might), but RHEL 5.7 likely does not.

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
26 November 2013 9:35 PM

Tom,

kernel-2.6.32-431.el6.x86_64 is the kernel for RHEL 6.5, so where to find a supported kernel release you mention?

I have not got a solution from Red Hat support, but asking them whether RHEL 5.7 might be the issue here? I got a negative response: Technical Preview software should work.

I will mention your suggestion about the CIFS modules to be patched to the case owner.

Thanks for the hint.

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

SO Community Member 40 points
26 November 2013 8:47 PM

We actually use the Samba3x packages for RHEL 5 servers. We use DFS here with a few issues, but mostly it works as expected

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
26 November 2013 9:37 PM

Steve,

I use the Samba3x packages too, but DNS resolving is not working. Mounting by ip-address works fine.

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

SO Community Member 40 points
27 November 2013 1:16 PM

have you tried using smbclient from the CLI and interactively log in. Sometimes it provides additional errors when trying to browse the file shares.

Additionally, did you turn up the logging to 6 or above in your smb.conf in order to debug the issues?

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
27 November 2013 4:12 PM

Get a (Error NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME) message
I do not see any logs in /var/lo/samba

SO Community Member 40 points
27 November 2013 4:24 PM

This message can mean a number of things. Most often it is due to 1) SELinux 2) bad permissions somewhere in the share path among other problems.

Unfortunately from what I understand, this is a generic error that could be dns related but most likely is not.

The other possibility is running a samba version less than 3.2 trying to connect to a Windows 2008 (and 2008R2) server. But because you stated you are already using samba3x that is most likely not the problem, but I would double check this

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
27 November 2013 4:30 PM

Great for you: Red Hat support uses your hints to have them tested by me.
Is not this what community support is all about?

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