Idiot's guide to DFS?

[BJG]

I'm back at work after several weeks' absence to find that the school has installed a new 2008 fileserver running a distributed filing system with the old 2003 server which is currently replicating the home folders. The person who set it up has now gone off work, and I'm fairly rushed off my feet with it being the first week of term, so I was wondering if there was someone with experience of this who could give me some quick reassurance; tell me it was a good idea etc. It looks like some of the user folders are currently mapped using the old system, which was to individual shares on the old 2003 fileserver, while others are mapped via a new domain-based method (if you know DFS you hopefully understand what I'm talking about better than I do.) Is this mix-and-match a pressing concern? Anything I need to watch out for?

 

Cheers!

[SYNACK]

DFS is good, it is kind of like a network shortcut that you can point anywhere which is handy as you can move shares about without rewriting scripts etc. Having some bits pointing direclty to the server and some to DFS is not to much of an issue.

 

Replication is slow and on 2003 was shocking for large volumes of data so depending on how large the share was and how DFS replication was set that could cause issues. 2003 R2 was much better but still not fantastic.

[BJG]

Thanks for that. I just discovered that the accounts which had been pointed to the domain-style share couldn't access their documents, so I've zapped them all back to the original style for now.

 

Under the original style, accounts were mapped to home folders by using the "Profile" setting in the account properties. These have the form:

 

Connect H: To \\[servername]\[share]

 

Several year groups had been changed to the form:

 

Connect H: To \\[domainname]\users\home\[year folder]\[username]

 

The file structure for the home folders is D:\Home\[year folder]\[username]. When these users signed on, they saw two folders called "Home" and "Profile" where they expected their documents to be, and couldn't get anywhere with them.

 

Any guesses what the person who configured this was trying to do, and why it didn't work...?

 

(Might have been sensible for them to test it before messing several hundred accounts around...*sigh*)

Edited September 8, 2011 by BJG

[SYNACK]

Possibly the person who configured it was short a few braincells. DFS works by having domain roots so you should have \\domain\DFRRootName\share it is possible that they left out the DFSRootName and hence it does not work. It is also possible that there is no WINS server configured and so it should be the full DNS name \\domain.internal\DFSRoot\share

 

Can you access it yourself by opening the dfs share?

 

Also what are the permissions on the DFSRoot, by default they may not inclued domain users which would also cause a fault like this.

[BJG]

(Thanks Synack...will investigate when I get more time...)