DFS - Dfs could not create reparse point for directory

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Had this today and thought I'd just share one possible cause as it really borked me for a couple of hours until I spotted a small discrepancy.

 

I opted to do a managed cleanup and move of my server and my primary workstation as there's been a lot of dust, hair, etc and this is the time of year to do all those "one day" jobs.... Anyway, after shutting everything down properly, cleaning up, reorganising cable, etc... I booted up and found that all my DFS shares were unavailable...

 

When I checked the Server 2k8R2 via RDP I found that there was an error in the system log:

Dfs could not create reparse point for directory ...

 

I rebooted a couple of times but still no joy... It was only when I realised that the system log was indicating a time approximately 5 minutes ahead before the NTP settings were picked up that I figured out what was going on.

 

As the Win2k8r2 server was booting up it was using the host VMWare ESXi time setting as its starting point and it was the host clock that was out of whack with the rest of the domain which uses a smoothie NTP server (sync'd to an ntp.pool).

 

Once I'd corrected the timestamp the DFS promptly recovered and a little extra reboot just to be sure...

 

Figured I'd share as someone is bound to come across this little bug and I've not found it reported as a possible problem/solution elsewhere.

 

Ho hum...

[SYNACK]

Good stuff, always nice to hear about the perils of virtualisation, I have had simmilar stuff with virtualised DFS shares on a virtual server where one of the DFS root servers managed to fire up before the actual content servers manage to be avalible. DFS used to be quite easy before NETBIOS lookup took the absolute backseat and required DNS to step in to become reliable. It is still the best solution but 2008 R2 has made it much more difficult to implement, virtualisation or not. I think Balmers devs need to throw a few more chairs its way . (feeding the stereotype ).