XP clients ignore 'allow caching' setting on DFS shares

[Daniel Billingsley]

Like a good DFS administrator, I've disabled the "allow caching..." checkbox
on all my shares participating in DFS. One of these is for redirecting My
Documents.

I find my XP laptops are still using My Documents offline like they are
completely ignoring this setting.

1) How can this be if the share is set to not allow it?
2) How do I stop it?

 

[Chris Warwick]

Like a good DFS administrator, I've disabled the "allow caching..."
checkbox on all my shares participating in DFS. One of these is for
redirecting My Documents.

I find my XP laptops are still using My Documents offline like they
are completely ignoring this setting.

1) How can this be if the share is set to not allow it?
2) How do I stop it?

Hi Daniel,

I've seen this behaviour too. I spent many long hours trying to figure it
out, but in the end gave up and moved my "My Documents" to a non-Dfs share.
I intend to try to make it work again now I'm on Server 2003, but plan to
set aside some solid, no-interruption time to work on it.

What I'm hoping to achieve is to get "My Documents" on a Dfs share but
*WITH* the ability from the client to enable or disable caching at an
individual folder level. It seemed before that as soon as I moved MyDocs
to Dfs the entire folder structure was cached (and the "Make Available
Offline" context option was grayed-out - I've seen someone else talking
about this in this group, btw).

I'll be interested in your progress and will post my further experiences
when I can.

Incidentally, does anyone have a definitive "Yes/No" to the question of
hosting offline folders on Dfs shares. I've seen so many articles that say
it just doesn't work or isn't supported, but I've also seen lots of
articles that say it's OK?

Regards,
Chris

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

I'm meeting with a developer next week to discuss CSC and DFS interactions
for the upcoming DFS technical reference. I'll post my findings when I have
them. I'll also take along this thread for talking points.

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Here is what I have so far.

DFS supports Offline Files for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 clients
only. The strange behavior you are seeing could be caused by a bug that was
fixed in XP SP1. You might also have Group Policy settings that are
overriding whatever you have configured locally. There are two places in
Group Policy where offline files are configured--in the Administrative
Templates folder under Computer Configuration and under User Configuration.

I'll post more details when I have them.

 

[Chris Warwick]

Here is what I have so far.

DFS supports Offline Files for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
clients only. The strange behavior you are seeing could be caused by a
bug that was fixed in XP SP1. You might also have Group Policy
settings that are overriding whatever you have configured locally.
There are two places in Group Policy where offline files are
configured--in the Administrative Templates folder under Computer
Configuration and under User Configuration.

I'll post more details when I have them.

Hi Jill,

This gives me sufficent motivation to try the configuration again; I don't
recall whether my last attempt was on SP1 or not - so that might have been
an issue. Also, as you say, there are a lot of Group Policy settings
(they're actually not toooo complex if you read them all carefully, but
it's a case of spotting them all and getting them right in the first place
- I've seen a thread here that suggests that restarting the client after
applying policy settings is a good idea, so I'll make sure I step carefully
and keep notes as I go along!)

I'll let you know how it goes.

Regards
Chris

 

[Daniel Billingsley]

Oh, well, that is really my concern. If it is supposed to work now with XP
SP1 then I'm good!

However, I'm still curious why/how XP is ignoring the "allow caching" on the
physical folder, which it is apparently doing.

Ok, one more thing - mainly for Chris I guess - on these XP clients I get
lots of sync errors, every time. I found a KB article that as I remember
said it's a matter of file types being excluded - as I remember XP is more
aggressive by default trying to sync things like .mdb files that shouldn't
be used offline. You probably know there are GPO settings for that too.

 

[Chris Warwick]

Oh, well, that is really my concern. If it is supposed to work now
with XP SP1 then I'm good!

However, I'm still curious why/how XP is ignoring the "allow caching"
on the physical folder, which it is apparently doing.

Ok, one more thing - mainly for Chris I guess - on these XP clients I
get lots of sync errors, every time. I found a KB article that as I
remember said it's a matter of file types being excluded - as I
remember XP is more aggressive by default trying to sync things like
.mdb files that shouldn't be used offline. You probably know there
are GPO settings for that too.

This is always a problem - especially if you set up the offline replication
to occur during shutdown (as I do on my laptops) and then find the dialog
waiting for you to remind you about an invalid file type or an open file
that couldn't be synched. I suppose this is better than silently failing
and letting one wander off, blissfully unaware that a copy of a vital file
was absent!

It's easy to understand these restrictions - they all make absolute sense -
but it's not so easy to explain all the exceptions (or to remember them
all!) when designing this kind of thing for others. In a similar vein, EFS
files not being copied across FRS replicas is another one to watch out for.
The biggest headache is trying to design a laptop build that uses no local
data storage (other than the CSC) in an environment where there's a
cultural reliance on Outlook PST files. Having an Outlook 2003 OST cached
locally is OK (it's a backup copy of data already on the server - best
thought of as the Exchange equivalent of the CSC really) but PST's may
contain valuable information that isn't otherwise replicated elsewhere.

Maybe WinFS (with appropriate applications' support I guess) will help fix
some of these things and tidy up some of the inconsistencies at the same
time - I haven't gotten around to looking at the latest builds yet...

One of the things on my "(e-mail address removed)" list is to enable me to save a
file from an e-mail attachment, at the same time removing it from the OST -
leaving just a pointer to the saved file (after all, I don't need two
copies). Perhaps WinFS will make all stores the same thing and this won't
be an issue anyway?

Anyway, musing mode off! Thanks for the tip. I'll let you know how I get
on...

Regards,
Chris