Desperate plea for help: disconnects on clients since DFS/redirected folders
KuroNeko
getting so desperate we're considering dumping DFS entirely and going
back to the old primitive ways.
This is a bit longish, I apologise. We work in a care institution for
severely mentally disabled children. Being a health care institution,
there is no real ICT tradition, people don't really know about computers.
Budget is low. Still, it has dawned on management we need to move into
the 21st century and we've upgraded our ancient failing Windows 2000
servers to 2003 R2. Our workstations are old donated P3 and P4 machines
running mostly Windows 2000 SP4 and a few select machines run XP SP3.
We set up things without DFS at first, and it worked perfectly, but now
that several campus are connected via internet/VPN over Juniper
firewalls, we wanted to implement a DFS setup that allowed workers who
moved between campus to access data locally, having folders synchronised
on each campus file server (small campus have only one server, an AD
controller that also serves as file server).
We also implemented redirected folders for the Desktop and My Documents
folders, to control how much and what they put in them. For instance,
only shortcuts on the desktop. At first, with a direct NetBIOS path in
the policy, later changed to the DFS path.
All worked well when we implemented this on our main campus. I should
say, we're helpdesk guys and girls, not Sysadmins. Since we cannot hire
one with our budget, we rent one for the difficult bits. He checked our
DFS setup and said we did it wrong (making namespaces for each share) and
changed it to a single namespace and folder, under which all shares would
be accessible. We then changed the redirected folder paths in the
policies to the DFS path rather than the NetBIOS path.
We synced all data folders and redirected folders to the new AD
controller for the first external campus. All worked OK, but it's after
hours, no clients logged on. Next day we move the server to the other
campus and set it up to connect over VPN. One domain the lot of it BTW.
All works well as we clean the local workstations, but as the day
progresses, we start getting error calls from users on main campus.
They lose their icons on the desktop, can't connect to shares. The sync
icon appears in the systray, and if they click on 'synchronise', in most
cases their connection is re-eastablished, but sometimes they need to
reboot. At first we think it's connected to printers, Canon iR5000's, as
it happens as people click 'print'. But as things progress, they start
seeing disconnects by opening shares, opening mail attachments on the
Exchange server etc.
Our hired expert looks things over, finds several glitches in DNS and
removes all our old obsolete DFS stuff etc. Things improve, but never go
away. We find data on Technet this might be a Windows 2000 issue, so we
install XP on some machines where the issue is most frequent, but this
does not help. A network specialist looks at out MTU sizes on the Juniper
firewall and the VPN connections, checks switches for errors etc, but
can't find anything wrong. The Sysadmin still believes the Canon printers
are at fault.
We're now on our last straw, deinstalling virusscanners on clients, and
removing the iR5000 drivers on clients. Tests are running now but we
don't have much hope that this is the cause. Once this proves to be so,
we're out of options and management wants us to kill DFS and redirected
folders. This would be a big setback as we're now even running backups
via DFS. And redirecting folders was the only way to force people not to
store data on their desktops. Back to square one. It would make the whole
network unmanagable as it continues to grow but ICT staff does not.
Does any of this ring a bell? Anything we should look at, check,
enable/disable etc? If you need more information please ask.
Thanks all in advance for your help, and happy holidays!
HDMW