If you are looking for dfs support in Samba, irrespective of what the doc or the mailing lists say - don’t bother trying. It does not work. Over the last 6 months, a few users including me have tried in vain to get the samba guys to look at this problem. There are atleast 3 P3 bugs awaiting for someone’s attention (probably Jerry).
The problem is quite simple. The msdfs code does not allow for server://share/dir as its dfs target. It expects that all shares are of the kind server://share. The funny part is that if you do try to target a server://share/dir as a msdfs link, it will try to lookup a server called server://share!
A blockheaded design, if you ask me.
I had it all worked out before this bug bit me. I was going to put the dfsroot directory on a global file system on ibrix. This dfsroot dir would be nothing but a directory of msdfs symlinks to other nfs automount areas. Since it’s in a global name space, its available to be hosted by all of the servers. And I could lump all the segment servers into a DNS round robin so I can use a cname like \fileshack.tigr.org\projects\<project> for all of the dfs links.
Instead we now may have to stick the dfsroot on a windoz virtual cluster. The CLI util definitely helps.