DFS Offline / UNC Online

[andy.g...@gmail.com]

Hello, my small organisation recently started using DFS and initially
this seemed to be working well. We recently started getting sporadic
incidents from a number of PCs where they would loose connection to
the file server and go into "offline" mode. When this happens, the
domain based DFS root is unavailable, and attempting to connect to it
will result in only syncronised files being accessible.

If the user connects to the underlying UNC share, all is well.

I have been trying to troubleshoot this for a little while now, and I
am not really getting anyplace - I have followed the article here:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/distrib/dsdb_dfs_stdz.mspx?mfr=true

without much light being shed on the problem.

The problem SEEMS to be AD related, since when I try and enumerate the
available namespaces by domain, I get an error saying the device is
not ready (this is the "add namespaces to display" section of the DFS
management tool). The tool can enumarate the server based namespaces
no problem.

I am not sure how I can try and isolate / resolve the problem further,
and would be very grateful for any pointers in the right direction.
Looking at the AD tree, I can see the DFS configuration blob under
system. Was debating about recreating the DFS root, but wanted to see
if I was even in the correct ballpark before I started tinkering...

Many thanks for any help.

Andy.

[andy.g...@gmail.com]

As an update, I just found this in the event logs of the machine
hosting the DFS root and the underlying file share:

File Server Resource Manager failed to enumerate share paths or DFS
paths. Mappings from local file paths to share and DFS paths may be
incomplete or temporarily unavailable. FSRM will retry the operation
at a later time.

Error-specific details:
Error: (0x80070015) The device is not ready.

The device is not ready is the same as we get when enumerating the dfs
roots from the management page, so it looks like I am at least getting
somewhere (even if it doesnt seem to be getting me any closer to
fixing it!)

On 12 Mar, 15:19, andy.g.jo...@gmail.com wrote:
> Hello, my small organisation recently started using DFS and initially
> this seemed to be working well. We recently started getting sporadic
> incidents from a number of PCs where they would loose connection to
> the file server and go into "offline" mode. When this happens, the
> domain based DFS root is unavailable, and attempting to connect to it
> will result in only syncronised files being accessible.
>
> If the user connects to the underlying UNC share, all is well.
>
> I have been trying to troubleshoot this for a little while now, and I

> am not really getting anyplace - I have followed the article here:http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/d...