Slow DFS on UNC

[Michael_84]

Hi

Am hopefully going to use DFS (Win2k3 R2 ver) next year for student documents, however right now am just testing it on two servers I've just setup to gain some experience, here's the layout:

Server1 (Win2k3 R2, Primary DNS, Domain Controller, Global Catalogue, Holds all roles)

Server2 (Win2k3 R2, Secondary DNS, Domain Controller, Global Catalogue)

Both have a share named stu_data, on DFS Management I have set both servers to be namespace servers and I added a folder pointing to Server1\stu_data and then selected "Add Folder Target" and added Server2\stu_data share.

Now, when I browse the network it works fine, I can see both shares in the DFS tab on the share and switch between the two, however here comes the frustrating part:

I decided to down one of the servers to test the fault tolerance DFS gives, however I noticed that DFS seems slow to respond on initial connection and when creating folders pauses before allowing you to create a name, at first I thought it was due to the Primary DNS server being down with clients waiting before trying the secondary DNS server. However I then took down the Secondary DNS server (with primary back online) and the DFS share responded exactly the same.

Now here is the interesting part :
The DFS share was accessed via the UNC, when both servers where running it was running beautifully, with one down (either one) it runs slow with the issues described above.

Now if the share is mapped to a network drive it works fine even when a server goes down you wouldn't know which is exactly what I want to happen.

Now for the pupil data I will be using folder redirection which to my knowledge goes off UNC only, so I need to get UNC browsing speed to be fast.

So if anyone has any ideas why that will be great

[Michael_84]

All fixed

Turns out there is a couple of fixes made to WinXP from SP2 to SP3 to the way it handles DFS. Since installing SP3 onto the client everything is working perfectly .

Can now move onto the task of setting up replication and trialling that

[Richie1972]

I am looking into extensive use of DFS over the summer and, to add to what was said in this thread, there is a patch you can download from microsoft to fix this DFS issue (which is fixed in XP SP3). Can't remember the name of the fix off hand though, but a search on the MS website should easily find it - you may also have to install the server version of the patch on your Win2k3 server

[Michael_84]

I am looking into extensive use of DFS over the summer and, to add to what was said in this thread, there is a patch you can download from microsoft to fix this DFS issue (which is fixed in XP SP3). Can't remember the name of the fix off hand though, but a search on the MS website should easily find it - you may also have to install the server version of the patch on your Win2k3 server

Hi, am running just the base level of Win2k3 R2 with SP2 no other patches and it's been running great, configured replication, no errors from the diagnostics which is great, going to also run DFS on my WDS images as doing a classroom of rooms slows down to a crawl on one server, hoping to power it with three servers which should be awesome.