0

I've run into another oddity recently on our cluster with respect to Windows 2003 and Windows 7 (using Explorer or even plain batch files, C# programs, FORTRAN programs, etc) and files on a CIFS share mapped without our fully-qualified-domain name. Our files are being stored on an Isilon running OneFS 6.5 (plus some minor rev).

If I map the drive like so:

net use z: \\isilon\folder\

And add files to that same folder from another machine in the cluster, the delay prior to seeing the files in Windows Explorer (or any program) on any other machine is infinite!

That is, unless I do something like the following:

echo 1 >z:\test.txt

Once I issue a write to the directory from my own machine, I can then see all of the other changes to that directory in Windows Explorer or a program of my choosing.

However, if I map the drive like so:

net use y: \\isilon.fqdn.com\folder

I receive updates in a timely fashion. I've even used sample programs which merely loop-and-poll over the directory and without the FQDN they do not receive any updates!

I'm not crazy, I swear!

Is there a setting on Windows which causes this behavior w.r.t. CIFS shares? Or is this an oddity of our Isilon?

user7116
  • 237
  • 3
  • 11
  • My first guess would be DNS suffix settings in Windows. `Networking -> IPv4 properties -> Advanced -> DNS tab`. Make sure your connection is automatically appending the DNS suffix, and that should make Windows dump the FQDN on the end of the hostname and solve your problem for you. – HopelessN00b Jul 26 '12 at 02:41
  • We have that already (3 choices in the search list, starting with the right one), oddly enough it appears to make no difference on the network side (Ethereal traces). But it obviously makes a difference somewhere! *(and at some point even the FQDN connection experiences delays, I assume after some keep-alive timeout)* – user7116 Jul 26 '12 at 02:44

1 Answers1

0

When analyzing the network traffic between Windows Explorer and our Isilon cluster (running 6.5.4.17), a large number of SMB messages with an NTSTATUS of STATUS_NOT_IMPLEMENTED were seen when the non-FQDN was used.

In effect, change notification does not appear to be (well) supported when using Netbios name resolution versus DNS name resolution. The solution is to instead always use the fully qualified domain name when mapping CIFS shares on an Isilon cluster.

user7116
  • 237
  • 3
  • 11