I have 2 clustered filers. One filer shares several vols via nfs. The security on these vols is set to unix. Some of them require access from windows in which case a cifs share has been created and ldap is used to map windows accounts to unix uids/gids.

On the other filer, all vols are ntfs, there's no nfs (cifs only), and ldap is configured and enabled.

We experienced an outage on all cifs connections on both filers when the one ldap server we were using went down. "net view" (from a windows client) would hang and explorer couldn't find the network path.

I would expect the mapping to fail and windows users to be mapped to the default pcuser on the unix vols accessed via cifs. I would also expect the cifs only filer to have no issues continuing to serve cifs. Is my expectation off? I can resolve the issue by adding additional ldap hosts but I want to uncover why cifs only connections are dependent on ldap when my ad domain controllers are online.

Thanks, jd