DFS Experts?

PatZ1989 · 10 Dec 2010 at 10:37

I think this may be a long shot but yeah, working through this issue and can't stop hitting road blocks

have a directory shared through DFS, can browse to it fine, can map a network drive to it fine if you do it yourself on the client

Create a group policy to map the drive however, fails with the errror "network path cannot be found". got to say im a bit stumped on this one

Thanks to anyone with any ideas

Burnsy2023 · 10 Dec 2010 at 10:59

Are you putting the fully qualified path in?

Yamahahahahaha · 10 Dec 2010 at 11:15

We have other sites connected via slower WAN links - it seems incredibly slow for all sites when we use the fully qualifed path in, so we resorted to UNC pathing which DFS is fine with. It worked out significantly quicker at all sites.
I'm sure some enlightened member could explain why this is so

\\<ServerHostName>\<DFSRootName> should be fine for mapping paths to.
eg, \\EggFaceServer\EggFaceFolder

PatZ1989 · 10 Dec 2010 at 11:25

It is the FQDN of the dfs share, was going to test by IP but obviously being a DFS share, it doesnt have one. like i said it maps fine if you just go on a computer, map a network drive to \\dfs.domain\share\, maps it instantly no problems start browing through the files.

group policy to map to the exact same place, cant be found

paradigm · 10 Dec 2010 at 11:42

I'm having a random DFS issue at the moment too. We've got a shared resource for clustered IIS configured, which for the sake of argument is at \\domain.local\IIS-DFS in which there is a wwwroot folder which is accessed by the two IIS boxes.

Browsing this (\\domain.local\IIS-DFS) from any of the domain member servers (or the domain controllers) works fine, however browsing from my machine (which is in a different domain, of which a 2 way trust exists between the two) I can't get there.

I can browse \\domain.local, and see the NETLOGON and SYSVOL shares, but can't see IIS-DFS at all.

Even stranger, if I browse to one of the members of the DFS replication IS01 or IS02 using it's fqdn \\IS01.domain.local, I CAN see IIS-DFS, but I can't actually get into it, only see that it exists at the root of \\IS01.domain.local

I can however access file shares such as \\IS01.domain.local\d$\inetpub\wwwroot (which is the folder replicated in DFS), and obviously writing to here replicates anyway due to the nature of DFS, but I'd like to resolve the problem properly.

PatZ1989 · 10 Dec 2010 at 11:52

to add to the unsual nature, the group policy works as expected and maps the drive on XP machines, seems to just be windows vista and windows 7 that has the problem

Yamahahahahaha · 10 Dec 2010 at 14:31

@PatZ1989
I've just had a look at our drive mapping script, we're pointing the drive maps to the local shares, not the DFS shares.

I don't believe there would be a problem pointing to the DFSroot/share to map, but it's probably worth just mapping the local shared folders.

http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/Logon/logon_error_onerrorresumenext.htm should help incase it's a script issue.

@paradigm
You probably need to look inside \\FQDN\Forest Root to see the DFS repository.

PatZ1989 · 10 Dec 2010 at 15:06

Resolved now, whoever set up the GPO left a trailing slash at the end which, as we know, doesnt work for drive mappings through command prompt i.e. \\server\share\ won't work through scripting or GPO, needs to be \\server\share

Thanks for help though