Folder redirection stopped working out the blue!

[robjduk]

Random things are sent to test us and today, I am being tested.....

 

Students have left for summer, Monday was fine and Tuesday morning was fine. All we have been doing is unboxing a few new computers and touched NOTHING on group policy or AD other than reset 21 accounts of new computers we were putting in....

 

The few admin staff then start to complain their desktops and start menus arnt working. To add injury to this, documents are taking an age to open...

 

Spend a day on this and reset everything there is to reset with no errors to be found anywhere. The only thing I have to go on is the error message in the event viewer....

 

"Failed to apply policy and redirect folder "desktop" to \\.....

redirection options=0x1001

....

This may be due to one or more files under the source or target folders with a fully qualified file name longer than 256 characters.

Error details: the copy functions cannot be used"

 

Again, must stress that no one has touched anything. These are the same policies which are definitely working when doing a GPresult that were working perfectly on Monday.

 

Please someone tell me they have seen this before and how easy it is to fix it! Lots of plans in the summer and fannying about with this was not one of them.

 

Ta

[rrrrr]

Have you checked antivirus possibly? Had an issue once along these lines, nothing had been touched, ended up being a dodgy av update. Worth a look.

[Sagima]

I've seen that error before but not in relation to folder redirection. If you want to check if anything has gone beyond the 260 character limit then I use this bit of powershell

 

Get-ChildItem -r * |? {$_.GetType().Name -match "File" } |? {$_.fullname.length -ge 260} |%{$_.fullname}

 

Our primary school is very keen on using exceptionally detailed folder names and file names (like having picture names listing the first and second name of every child in the picture and putting that under a folder called something like "Photographs of the children of form 1u at colchester zoo in september 2015" which is, again, under an equally descriptive folder name

Edited July 21, 2016 by Sagima
formating

[robjduk]

thanks for suggestions so far. I have uninstalled AV from the server with the redirected folders and a test VM but issue persists. Going to look further into this 250 limit however my paths are exactly as they have been for the past 5 years and changed nothing.

 

Todays going to be annoying isnt it?

[HBPS]

I had a similar issue about 2 years ago. I think from memory might be wrong.. i think its because some folders had offline files enabled.

[kennysarmy]

I presume you have re-created your redirection policy from scratch in case the original someone has got corrupt?

[rrrrr]

thanks for suggestions so far. I have uninstalled AV from the server with the redirected folders and a test VM but issue persists. Going to look further into this 250 limit however my paths are exactly as they have been for the past 5 years and changed nothing.

 

Todays going to be annoying isnt it?

 

Think it was av at desktop level for me. Might be worth trying a couple of affected stations without it

[zoohead]

I had a problem with Folder Redirection a while back. It turned out to be a partially corrupted filesystem. Moved Desktops and Program Menus to a different server, amended GPO's and all ok.