I got the DFS blues!

[rchapman007]

Hey everyone! I am new to this forum and I thought that maybe someone can help me out with a big DFS issue that I am having. I am going to try to explain this clearly so just bear with me on this...

I am a Systems Administrator for a large call center that has over 30 sites all across the USA. My issue is that some of our sites are experiencing really slow start menu loads and I am trying to fix that. We have GPOs configured for start menu redirections that point to a DFS share. The DFS share is configured to be stored on all of the site's local DC.

I believe what is happening is that for the center that I work at, the start menus are trying to be loaded from a different DFS share other than our local DC. So that is why it's taken forever to load! I also found out something really interesting. Let's say that the DFS share is \\contoso.org\dfs\

If I pinged contoso.org I don't get the local DC's IP address. I get another site's DC IP address. If I wait a few more minutes, I ping contoso.org again and I get a completely different DC IP address again! It's like contoso.org is jumping from one DC to another DC and never pointing to our local DC at all. Could my theory be correct?

I really want to think there is something up with our DFS share. I want to make sure that our start menu's are being pulled from the DFS share from our local DC first and if our DC goes down, it will pull the share from other site.

All computers are using Windows XP Pro and our local server is Windows 2K3 RC1 I believe. If you have any ideas or theories, please let me know. I want to be the local hero! Thanks again!

 

[acl03]

Sounds to me like you have one "Site" set up in AD sites and services.

In order to guarantee that your users hit the local DC when using the DNS name of your domain, you must set up sites for each location, and the appropriate subnet mask.

In addition, each user's PC much be configured properly with the same subnet mask.



Thanks,
Andrew

 

[rchapman007]

Hey acl03:

Yeah, I checked into that as well and everything is setup correctly.

 

[acl03]

Well it seems as if it's not, or your users would always resolve the domain name to the local DC.

Can you give a description of how your sites/subnets are configured, and also an example of the network settings for one PC in a remote office?



Thanks,
Andrew