SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Abstract
An SMB3 File Server is not complete without the Witness service. Samba is currently developing support for this DCE/RPC service that allows for Continuous Availability (CA), a much more robust, fine-grained and seamless mechanism for client failover in clustered environments. This talk will outline the current implementation within Samba, the relationship with CTDB, challenges faced in development, and the planned integration with other projects like the CIFS kernel client and Pacemaker. This talk will also include a live demonstration showcasing the Witness infrastructure, it's role in CA, and how it can be controlled from a remote application.
Learning Objectives
How Witness works and what it does
How to achieve a seamless file sharing experience for SMB3 clients
How to deal programmatically with failover in clustered Samba environments