1.4 Relationship to Other Protocols

The DFS: Referral Protocol relies on the Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol, (as specified in [MS-SMB]) or the Server Message Block (SMB) Version 2 Protocol (as specified in [MS-SMB2]), or the Common Internet File System Protocol (as specified in [MS-CIFS]) as its transport layer.

The DFS topology and configuration of DFS namespaces named by referral requests are maintained by the Distributed File System (DFS): Namespace Management Protocol (as specified in [MS-DFSNM]).

The DFS: Referral protocol depends on the Netlogon Remote Protocol Specification (as specified in [MS-NRPC]) to determine the site of the client from the IP address.

The DFS: Referral Protocol allows SMB (as specified in [MS-SMB] and [MS-SMB2]) file system clients to resolve names from a namespace distributed across many servers and geographies into local names on specific file servers. After names have been resolved, clients can directly access files on the identified servers by using file system protocols, such as the SMB Protocol, the SMB Version 2.0 Protocol, the Common Internet File System Protocol, NFS (as specified in [RFC3530]), and NCP (as specified in [NOVELL]).

The DFS: Referral Protocol does not specify a replication protocol for file and directory content between DFS root targets or DFS link targets, nor does it interact with any such protocol. While replication can be used in a deployment of the DFS: Referral Protocol, it is equally reasonable for the respective targets to have differing content. Enforcing appropriate consistency for file and directory content is a deployment-specific consideration.

All protocols that use SMB to access files on remote machines depend on DFS if those files are located on shares in a DFS namespace.