DNS Alias of DFS Share

[gmail2]

We have about 20 offices all sharing the same domain across multiple countries. Unfortunately some offices are quiet small, so we can't afford to have a domain wide DFS that is across all our offices because of lack of space in the smaller offices. We do, however have DFS in our larger offices. What I would like to do, is create a non-AD integrated DNS zone in each office which has an alias that points to that office's server. This way I can create GPO's to install apps pointing to the alias, and apply the same GPO in multiple places but always install from the local source.

However, my question is, how cn I create a DNS alias in the offices that have DFS so that it points to the DFS share rather than to one particular server

If anybody can help on this, or provide any alternative, I'd really appreciate it

Thanks in advance

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[theravager]

just use the actual path to the dfs share with the server name, you don't need alias. THe normal name just uses net mask ordering to return the ip address of the closest server if there is one.

 

[gmail2]

Sorry, maybe I didn't explain properly in my original post. 16 of the 20 offices have one file server which stores all their data etc. Our four largest offices have two file servers which host DFS shares. So although we are using DFS for redunandcy, each DFS share still only contains that offiece's data.

What I wanto to do is create the same alias name in each office, but the value in each office will be the local file server name. This will work fine for the 16 smaller offices, but how do I get around this for the 4 offices that have DFS. How do I create an alias that will point to the DFS share rather than to a server?

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[theravager]

Theres a registry key you have to change on a windows server in order to be able to use a aliased name.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters
Value name: DisableStrictNameChecking
Data type: REG_DWORD
Radix: Decimal
Value: 1

Other then that I would expect it will work like a normal file share providing you have the replication and security permissions set i would hope.

 

[gmail2]

Yea, I've already done that. I think maybe I need to explain with an example:

Lets take 2 offices, Stockholm and Hamburg. Stockholm is a small office with only one file server (stockholm01) and Hamburg is a large office with two file servers and therefore uses DFS (bear in mind that DFS only replicates within the same office due to expensive WAN connections back to head office).

Say I want to deploy Adobe Reader 8 to my users in both offices. In Stockholm, it would be available at \\stockholm01\UserApplications\AdobeReader8 and in Hamburg it would be available at \\hamburg01\dfs-hamburg\UserApplications\AdobeReader8.

So creating my alias in Stockholm is easy, it could just be accessed at \\appserver01\UserApplications\AdobeReader8 - but how do I do the same for Hamburg?

Like I said, we can't have all data replicate across the domain because this is too cost prohibitive in the smaller offices. And because we have DFS employed in more than one office, we need to have a separate root folder for these offices (eg dfs-hamburg, dfs-milan etc).

Also, it wouldn't be possible to have the UserApplications folder as a DFS root share because some offices would have apps that other offices won't have (eg AutoCAD, Visio etc etc). So it would be too wasteful to store this apps in offices that will never need them. That's why I want to use an alias instead, so we can manually copy the apps to only the offices that need them but use the same policy for each office.

Any ideas at all how I can do this, or any work around?

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[gmail2]

Please, can anybody point me in the right direction on this at all?

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[theravager]

Create a share called user applications that is on the folder holding the dfs. Basically ignore the fact there is dfs in use on the those servers.