How to use CIFS over a WAN connection

[davidmcgiven]

Dear Netapp users,

Considering we are using a FAS270 filer, with DataONTAP 7.2.1.1 :

How would I configure it so I can access the CIFS shares over a WAN network ?

I haven't found a simple answer for this. Nor detailed instructions on how to do it.

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,

David

[davidmcgiven]

Thanks Peter, John and Reinhardt.

I realize now that my question was silly because I thought CIFS worked only inside the same LAN segment. I was asking if there was a way to use CIFS over WAN (without using VLAN's on the comms equipment) but it turns out that CIFS works over WAN by default.

Thanks again.

[reinhardt_kern · Accepted solution]

Hi David,

there is no problem with CIFS over WAN. Copying files from/to a WAN based CIFS share works fine for many years.

But there are lots of problems with the applications. Microsoft Office, especially Word, is not designed to open files on a share with latency +30ms. This will cause a lot of user requests and a lot of broken documents. My proposal: Train your users to copy files locally before opening. Or install a Riverbed WAN accellerator. It will cache all WAN traffic. Or redirect the file access over WebDAV.

Reinhardt

[schmitz_peter]

Hi David,

I am not sure I understand the question correctly.

Would you like to know *how* to configure CIFS shares on your filer? That's a simple one: "cifs shares -add <shareName> <path> [ -comment <description> ]" on the command line.

Or, if you use FilerView go to "CIFS > Shares > Add" and click away.

If you are using an AD tree give permissions and distribute the share, may it be LAN or WAN.

Though, whether sharing over WAN is feasible or not depends very much on speed, traffic and load of the line, and also on the size of transmitted data.

Cheers

Peter

[fjohn]

CIFS over WAN ....

Is probably going to be a bit painful unless you are using a client and an ONTAP version that supports SMB 2.0 Durable Handles.  I think that's 7.3.1/8.0 7mode or later off the top of my head.

Then you'd want to enable the durable handles et al.  You might want to look into the following options that apply to SMB 2.0

cifs.smb2.client.enable	Enables or disables the storage system's SMB 2.0 protocol client capability.	off	7.3.1
cifs.smb2.enable	Enables or disables the SMB 2.0 protocol.	off	7.3.1
cifs.smb2.durable_handle.enable	Enables or disables SMB 2.0 durable handles.	on	7.3.1
cifs.smb2.durable_handle.timeout	Specifies the SMB 2.0 durable handle timeout value.	16m	7.3.1
cifs.smb2.signing.required	Enables or disables the requirement that clients sign SMB 2.0 messages.	off	7.3.1

John