USING DFS Across Domains?

[Ted Appleberry]

I have two servers in different domains in the same forest and am attempting
to replicate folders across them.. There is a two way trust relationship
established between the domains. When I go to set up my ROOT REPLICA on
Server A in Domain A it will only show me systems in DOMAIN A. If I force in
the full path to the server in domain B (IE, server.domainb.com) I am told
"The server server.domain.com does not belong to the domain specified
earlier". Surely folders can be replicated between servers on different
domains when in the same forest? I was able to set-up DFS links with no
problems between the systems but really need replication for this particular
application.

Many Thanks..

 

[someone]

I don't think DFS will help in data replication. You may
have to use third party stuff like NSI double-take etc.
Also, you can schedule a XCOPY task to copy the changes
form one folder to the other on a regular basis.

 

[Guest]

Ted is probably referring to FRS (which is conveniently configurable from the DFS snapin on a domain rooted DFS).

I don't have mutliple domains to play with here, but I did a couple of searches and found many references to FRS being domain wide, but none referencing it being cross domain or forest wide.

 

[Mukul Gupta [MSFT]]

You cannot have a DFS root on two servers that are across different domains.
However, you can have a DFS link pointing to targets that are across
differnet domains. These targets can replicate but certain conditions
related to permissions must be met first.

It all comes down to access permissions. The user who enables replication
must have:

* Local admin rights on all members

* Full control, including child objects, on the computer objects for each
member (the computer object will be spread across the domains)

* Full control on the File Replication Service container under the system
container in one of the domains. The settings in the File Replication
Service container can go in any of the domains, but the trick is to know
which domain will be used by the tool being used to create the replica set.
When the DFS MMC snap-in is used to create a DFS based Replica set the
domain used for the File Replication Service is the same domain that hosts
the domain based DFS root.

This way is little tricky. You can still use DFS with link targets across
different domains/forests and can use robocopy type of tools for
replication. Note: you will still need trust setup between domains to give
permissions for copy/replicate.
--
Thanks
Mukul [MSFT]

PS: Please post DFS related queries in newsgroup
microsoft.public.win2000.file_system. Please use "DFS" in subject to make it
immediately noticeable.

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