Offline folders on a DFS share

[Mark]

We seem to be having problems with offline folders on DFS
shares. The offline folders are having problems connecting
to the DFS share, so it thinks it is offline. Since it
thinks it is offline then the users cannot get to the
shares at all. This happens when they are connected to the
lan. I found an article on technet that says there are
issues with DFS and offline folders, but it doesn't say
what they are the article is Q302934. Is there any other
info on this?

Thanks,
Mark

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

This only works if your clients are running Windows XP (preferably with SP1)
or Windows Server 2003. For W2K and earlier clients, this isn't supported.
It has something to do with the redirector on pre-XP clients--I don't have
the specific details about why this does work but can get them if you want.
The article you mention gives some advice on how to disable offline files
for DFS shares to avoid this issue.

 

[Daniel Billingsley]

Hey Jill.. I for one am still waiting for the results of your research into
why XP seems to ignore those disabling settings. Did I miss your post?

Also, it seems my XP client is ignoring the GPO setting to synchronize
offline files before logoff - this is not a good situation as you can
imagine.

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Hi Daniel, sorry for the delay.

My research thus far has not turned up the exact answers you want. From what
I'm told, we don't have any known DFS/CSC interaction problems for clients
running XP SP1. My best guess is that you have conflicting group policies.
There are two places where CSC group policies are stored--I believe they are
in the Administrative Templates/Network/Offline Files folder under both
Computer Configuration and User Configuration. If you check both of these
places and do not find conflicting policies, please post a detailed
description of what you are seeing and I'll forward your message on to the
appropriate people.

 

[Mark]

Jill,

Are there any issues with DFS and VPN's? We seem to be
experiencing issues where the DFS shares are not available
and they do not map drives when the login script is run
through a VPN. This happens with win2k and xp clients.

Thanks,
Mark

 

[Daniel Billingsley]

As recommended, I have the cache option turned off on all the shares
participating in DFS, including the ones to which My Document is redirected
via Group Policy.

I have 50-something Win2k Pro workstations that all work as expected, which
would seem to rule out GPO conflicts, but just for giggles I went through
them all and verified the only settings are in one No Override GPO applied
to the domain.

When I open My Documents on the two XP workstations all the folders show the
little available offline icon. Indeed, I have verified I can access files
there when not connected to the network as normal for offline file
operation.

I suppose I wouldn't care so much if DFS and offline files is supposed to
now work for XP except the XP clients are also apparently ignoring the Group
Policy setting to synchronize everything before logging off. Again, this
works as expected on the Win2k Pro clients.

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Hi Mark,

I will check on this and get back to you.

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Daniel, I'll pass this along to the appropriate folks and get back to you.

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Mark,

Below is the response I received from one of our testers. The SPCINfo he's
talking about is viewable if you run Dfsutil on the client and use the
/spcinfo parameter. Let me know if you have questions.



When a machine VPNs, if machine is part of domain it has to get SPCInfo
(list of domain and DCs to talk to) immediately for anyone to be able to
connect to domain-based DFS root. It may take little time to get SPCInfo (he
can check that he is able to map drives after sometime) however he should be
able to access domain-based roots using FQDN names.