Installation guide

122 Chapter 6:Network File Sharing Services
measures to respond to the lack of immediate response from the Samba server. In the case of a planned
service relocation or a true failover scenario, there is a period of time where the Windows clients will
not get immediate response from the Samba server. Robust Windows applications will retry requests
which timeout during this interval.
Well-behaved applications will correctly retry for a service response, resulting in Windows clients
being completely unaware of service relocations or failover operations. In contrast, poorly behaved
Windows applications will result in error messages in the event of a failover or relocation indicating
the inability to access the share. It may be necessary to retry the operation or restart the application
in order to enable Windows client systems to reattach to a Samba share for applications that do not
correctly behave during failover or service relocation.
The behavior of a Windows based client in response to either failover or relocation of a samba service
also varies on which release of windows is installed on each client system. For example, Windows
98 based systems often encounter errors such as, "The network path was not found". Whereas, later
versions such as Windows 2000 transparently recover under the same set of circumstances.