DFS and site awareness

[Mel]

We have a domain DFS site set up which has links to 4 different
regional servers.
Site awareness works fine, we get routed to the correct site. If the
site closest to us goes down, we are then properly routed to the next.
My question is- how do we get back to the original when it comes back
online? It does not seem to do this automatically. The dfsutil
/pktflush does work- is this the only way aside from a reboot of the
client to get back to the closest copy of the link?
I have also set the "time that clients cache this referral" to be 30
seconds, but it does not seem to fix the problem.
The DC's are at Windows 2003 server.
thanks!

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Hi Mel,

The minimum referral expiration (we call it the Time to Live or TTL) is 240
seconds (4 minutes). Even if you set the referral to 30 seconds, the
referrals won't expire for 4 minutes. In addition, if a client accesses the
target, the expiration time is automatically reset, so this can be a problem
if clients continue to access the target. You can use the methods you
mentioned to forcibly flush the cache.