Problems with 10.8 and DFS on Windows network

[ajf]

Not sure if this was best here or in 'Enterprise' so feel free to move.

We have recently changed over our Server 2008r2 network to use DFS for all user access.
The majority are Windows desktops which work fine.

There are however 4 Macs and we are having a range of issues with them.
3 are running 10.8 with all updates and 1 is on 10.9 with all updates.

The issues are:
They access the DFS share via 'Connect to Server' which is fine. However if they do not access the folders again for an hour or so the connection appears to disconnect.

It is also VERY slow at showing the contents when browsing folders.

Problems creating new folders within their shares through Save or Save As. This appears to be known about:
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8260

Any thoughts/fixes for these problems?

 

[squerble]

How is the 10.9 behaving? I was under the impression they'd sorted a lot of the SMB speed/compatibility issues under Mavericks?

Is the DFS share a home area for each user, or is it a shared area? Presuming your using Active Directory, you can set this as their home drive, and then force the Macs to use the AD home drive to map the Mac users home area to.

 

[ajf]

Having tested it on both 10.9 seems to be pretty mich the same. It is slightly faster but the disconnect issue is still there. It seems to be about one hour of no activity on the share before it disconnects.
I have looked at all the power saving/network settings and nothing is set that I can find - although I mainly support Windows!

The DFS share is a departmental share so several people are using it, including some Windows PCs.

One thing we did come across was that the DFS Root and one of the DFS Folders/Shares had the same name. However renaming it ended up not making any difference to the slow and disconnect issues.