3.4.0 MxFS for CIFS Administration Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction 3

CIFS and Legacy Client Operating

Systems

Several legacy client operating systems do not support the modern

networking infrastructure required to connect to a virtualized network

connection such as that provided by the Virtual CIFS Server. These

operating systems include Windows NT4, Windows ME, Windows 98,

Windows 95, Windows 3.1, DOS, MAC SMB client, and some Linux

versions. To support connectivity with these legacy clients, should be

deployed with Matrix File Shares, plus DFS for connection load balancing

and failover.

Many of these clients support the DFS interface; however, some of the

operating systems (namely Windows 95/98/ME/NT4, Mac SMB clients,

and Linux) require a software update to interoperate with DFS.

Windows Clients

The following Microsoft Knowledge Base articles contain information

about the Windows clients.

Windows 95/NT. The Windows 2000 AD/DFS client is recommended. See

Microsoft Knowledge Base article 288358 for more information.

Windows 98/ME. The DS2003 client is recommended. A hotfix for

Windows 98 is also needed.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;555038

The following article regarding Windows ME may also be of interest.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;276472

Note that DOS and Windows 3.1 do not support DFS. While these clients

can connect directly to Matrix File Shares (MFS), they cannot take

advantage of the high availability and load balancing features provided

by the Matrix File Shares/DFS deployment model.