Q
Problem solve Get help with specific problems with your technologies, process and projects.

CIFS and protocols

You have a good understanding of the issue. Because of the stateful case of CIFS, a failover will still require an intervention on the accessing client. Basically it results in a retry but you must respond.

Failover on Windows-based system.

We are investigating a Windows clustered NAS system that can do the file IO level automatic failover. My concern is that since the Windows file system is CIFS that is a stateful protocol, if one host of the cluster goes away, the network connection will be lost during the cluster switch over and the file descriptors of the clients become invalid.
You have a good understanding of the issue. Because of the stateful case of CIFS, a failover will still require an intervention on the accessing client. Basically it results in a retry but you must respond.

There's no alternative here with the implementation. The CIFS protocol gives you some very good security capabilities and the stateful environment is one of the byproducts of that.

Randy Kerns

Editor's note: Do you agree with this expert's response? If you have more to share, post it in one of our .bphAaR2qhqA^0@/searchstorage>discussion forums.


This was last published in January 2004

Dig Deeper on NAS devices

Have a question for an expert?

Please add a title for your question

Get answers from a TechTarget expert on whatever's puzzling you.

You will be able to add details on the next page.

Meet all of our Storage Technology experts

View all Storage Technology questions and answers

Start the conversation

Send me notifications when other members comment.

Register

By submitting you agree to receive email from TechTarget and its partners. If you reside outside of the United States, you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Privacy

Please create a username to comment.

-ADS BY GOOGLE

SearchDisasterRecovery

SearchDataBackup

SearchConvergedInfrastructure

Close