DFS best practices

[smarties11]

Hi All,

 

For years, we've used DFS here to present shares. So for example, our 'shared data' folder is \\domainname\shared$, with namespace server \\server\shared$. The contents of the shared drive are saved in \\server\shared$ and therefore presented via \\domainname\shared$.

 

It's been like this for at least 10 years and means when we migrate file servers we can just update the namespace servers and all drive mappings etc continue to work.

 

We're trialling a new product for remote live access to files, and it works beautifully except all attempts to rename files fail. The new product runs on a Linux distro, and the product team have worked out that the underlying samba agent has issues with the DFS structure. It honours it for read and write operations but causes an error on rename operation. The product team have come back to say storing data in a DFS root isn't good practice and we should really use folder targets within the namespace. However to change this now would obviously be a big change, as I'd have to have a new level within the DFS share, i.e. \\domainname\public with folder targets for shared, applications etc and then update the relevant drive mappings to \\domainname\public\shared$, \\domainname\public\apps$ etc.

 

I just wondered if anyone else does what we do here and whether it really is such a bad idea? It's caused us 0 issues in the past 10 or so years so I'm reluctant to change for what is quite a minor issue! I didn't even realise it was 'wrong' until today!

 

Thanks

Edited December 5, 2018 by smarties11

[k-strider]

I've used it for years too we present \\ourschool.domain\DFS\StudentShare as J: and \\ourschool.domain\DFS\StaffShare as K: and \\ourschool.domain\DFS\Programs as G: for very similar reasons as you i have two file servers but we only allow referrals to one,

so there is a live replicated copy of the data just encase a server goes down i can swap the referral over.. and when replacing servers i simply remove the old server target add the new one without referrals until the data has replicated - no one is any the wiser

 

I'm surprised it has issues we have a product based on centos i think called foldr and it doesn't seem to have issues with the DFS structure.