Hello,

The Windows team at our place just updated a bunch of our file servers to use the new Windows 2012 Geocluster and now we're having difficulties mounting volumes.

Basically, we've got autofs set to mount specific volumes, but with the updated geocluster, there are two A records in DNS...one for the active node and one for the inactive node. I'm not completely familiar with this technology, but what appears to be happening is this:

1. The Linux server attempts to mount using autofs. Since the reference in the auto.xxx file uses the host name, it queries DNS for an IP address.
2. 50% of the time, DNS returns the IP address of the active node and the mount works.
3. The other 50% of the time, DNS returns the value for the inactive node and, obviously, the mount fails.

We can't be the only people in the world dealing with this. Has anyone found anything that remediates this? I would rather not hard-code the IP address to mount volumes, but that's basically what we're having to do for now until this can be resolved.

I've already done all my ranting about why this wasn't properly tested prior to going live in production with it and all that sort of thing, so now I just need to figure out how to get these mounts to work properly.

The Linux server is RHEL5 and has samba-client-3.0.33-3.40 rpm installed. As well as samba-common (same version).

Any ideas or help is appreciated as I continue to search for a solution.

Thanks!!

It seems the solution is with the Windows side of this and not the Linux side.

There is a setting on the file server's active cluster, RegisterAllProvidersIP, which, when set to 1 creates DNS entries for both the active AND passive nodes. When set to 0, it only registers the IP for the active node in DNS.

In the event of a failover, the passive node becomes active and that IP is registered in DNS. This can cause DNS failures until DNS servers replicate and cached IP's are cleared/refreshed.