Windows Server - Windows 7 dropping connection to local DFS root

Asked By David Smith

29-Jan-10 09:17 AM

Hi there. We are a small organisation with 2 sites; these sites are
connected via a VPN through WatchGuard boxes. We run Windows 2003 R2 servers
and use DFS2 to create organisation wide access to data. This namespace
contains about 5 shares which are then mapped using logon scripts to drive
letters. This has worked fine for over 3 years using a majority of XP Pro
clients and 3 Vista Business clients. However I have replaced some of the
older systems with 6 new systems running Windows 7 Professional and it is
these that are experiencing issues. The problem seems to be that staff using
these systems will suddenly say their system is running slow when accessing
shares and what appears to have happened is that the PC has dropped the link
to the local (site) based server DFS root and has instead connected to the
remote site's DFS root (indeed you can see this by looking in the new style
Windows Explorer at the properties of the mapped drive letter and choose the
DFS tab). Indeed it would appear that these systems cannot even connect to
the local DFS root at all - they cannot resolve the servers name to a valid
IP address. So RUN -> \\server1\ produces nothing whereas \\10.0.0.x\
instantly shows the shares\printers hosted by that server.
Therefore I do not know whether this is a DFS issue, a DNS issue or something
specific to Windows 7; all the PCs are DHCP based and seem to pick up all
relevant DHCP provided information and, once re-booted, instantly work fine.

Has anyone any thoughts please?
with kind regards in advance


David N Smith


Has

19-May-10 08:14 AM

David



I have seen DFS problems with Windows 7 when accessing a DFS root with multiple roots. Sometimes shares are not accessible anymore when using FQDN names and/or Netbios names (when the problom occurs which is around 1 time per day over 600 workstations, sometimes none work, sometimes one is working the other is not working). We used a work arrount to point directly to one of the root servers instead of the DFS root. This always works but  you are not redundant anymore.



We have issued this to Microsoft however no solution yet