DFS Site Awareness Problem

[mhiney]

Hi.

The latest piece of fun I'm having with DFS is that site awareness has gone completely out the window. I see on another website that this is symptomatic of clients not being able to see a local root replica in their own site, but have no idea why this should be - the replica is most definitely there and available. The only funny thing on my network I can think of that could be contributing to this is that we use a 22 bit netmask. Any ideas anybody?

Cheers,

mh

 

[fuunstatic]

We had the referal problem as well with clients using dc from a remote site instead of local dc

our solution was to do anyway with this referral and do the following

1. set up roots on all DCS
1a. set login script so that users are mapped to their local root depening on the logon server that mapped them
2. configure DNS so that the root points to points to its local fileserver containg the files
3. add in additional replica links at each site to point to the other roots in the other sites

now everyone has a P drive showing site1, site2, site3 etc and their P drive is always mapped to their local server

win2003 can handle multiple roots and may be a another viable option for some

"Work to live, don't live to work"

"The problem with troubleshooting is that sometimes it shoots back"

 

[vbrocks]

I have to apoligize for my previous post ...

Which was:
You should not use a network ID of 10.10.0 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 because the last octet of an ID should not be all zeroes or all ones .....
The same goes for a host ID using a conventional subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 .

Please Forgive me ... I WAS WRONG .. I don't know what I was thinking ... It should read like this .....

A network ID should not be all zeroes or all ones .....

The same goes for a host ID .......

Please forgive my mistake Thanks ......

 

[stevedeb]

vbrocks,

No problem. Sometimes its good to second guess ourselves. You had me looking in my old CCNA book. Although we now know my address acheme is OK it never hurts to review things, that's what I was doing. It's been a while since I have looked at any of that and a review of the basics is always a good thing.

Still having problem though. I manually entered the DWORDS in the registry of DNS server. I think tonight I will do a reboot. The LocalNetPriority DWORD was definately missing.

Steve

 

[vbrocks]

Thanks for understanding Steve .....

 

[mhiney]

Steve - let us know if it works for you, please?

It's seemed perfectly fine for me so far, but that doesn't mean it's working perfectly for every client.

 

[vbrocks]

http://www.winnetmag.com/Articles/ArticleID/7471/pg/1/1.html

This article is very good .....

 

[stevedeb]

I am very disheartened, I added the reg entry and it still doesn't work. I even rebooted the DNS server last night. I came in this morning and went to s: drive properties. The reference is still being generated randomly. Any other ideas?

 

[vbrocks]

As a temporary (or permanent solution) you could set it manually using a GPO and a logon script ....
Just put the users into an OU that you want to have using the DFS Root locally ....

 

[vbrocks]

Another thing you could do is make sure you have your local file server listed in the local DNS records on the DNS server. Then remove any records for the other servers that have the replicas. Then add the DNS servers for those machines to the forwarders list. Have your workstations point to the local DNS server as Primary DNS in TCP/ip properties....

What do you think?

 

[mhiney]

I been thinking...

The SYSVOL share uses the same core technology as DFS, but (on my network at least) doesn't exhibit the same problems. Just browse to \\domain\sysvol and check the DFS tab under Properties. So what's different between the two?

 

[monstor]

I just recently joined here, so this is a bit late, but I wanted to throw this in.
We had the problem of all users in one sie always getting connected to the DFS share in a remote site. We followed the recommendations from

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;282071

for setting the /insite flag with dfsutil. This did not fix the problem.

Setting the DNS service parameter LocalNetPriority to 1 and restarting DNS on each DNS server fixed the problem.

Thanks for the great discussion & info!

-asm

 

[stevedeb]

Thanks Monstor,

I will try that b/c I still have not fixed the problem. It may take a fwe days b/c I just got back from vacation, but I will post my success or failure for others to learn from.

Steve