Hey folks,
Strap in, because this might take a while:
For years I've been using typical windows file shares on my servers ( \\server\share$ ) and mapping drives in GPO. This is fine. I've also been using folder redirection for users' Desktop & My Documents. This is also working fine.
Users' redirected folders live on their home drives ( ie \\server\users$\%USERNAME%\Desktop )
This has been the setup for quite a while (10-ish years?) and I have been really pleased with functionality.
A lot of my users float between workstations, so they can access all their data from multiple terminals. 1/3 of my staff are mobile and their data sync via Offline Files. All is well and good.
Now I've finally gotten a budget to replace my file server because old file server is old ( data are saved to 2 direct attached SCSI arrays using Adaptec 29320 cards ).
I started reading about DFS and it seems like a great idea. No more server names in shares! Replication! Redundancy! Hooray!
I've built my namespace and added old & new file servers.
I set up replication between the two. When I start changing my GPO for folder redirection and mapping home drive, things have gotten weird and I'm hoping there might be some insight in here.
Examples:
I changed folder redirection paths
from \\server\users$\%USERNAME%\Desktop
to \\domain\users$\%USERNAME%\Desktop
a random number of my users had folder icons for every user on their desktop. They couldn't open the other users' folders. A couple whacks with gpupdate /force seems to have cleared these up.
Users were getting a file security error on random shortcuts/ files on desktops. I updated the GPO Internet Security site to zone assignment list for my domain and those have stopped.
When I change home drives mapping to \\domain\users$\%USERNAME% in GPO (not user object in ADUC)
some users are getting permissions denied when accessing home drive contents. U:\Desktop doesn't match what they see on their redirected desktop. Sometimes, a file deleted or written to the mapped drive never updates on redirected Desktop. Sometimes it works. Some files are read only.
I've set replication between old & new servers. When I compare file sets there are _a lot_ of discrepencies.
\\domain\users$ matches \\oldserver\users$ and matches \\newserver\users$
\\domain\users$ also matches \\oldserver\drive$\users folder
However: \\newserver\drive$\users is a completely different data set.
When I look at dfsrdiag replicationstate, there are 0 incoming or outgoing files on either server.
I'm worried about decommisioning the old server. It seems to be the "master" of the namespace and not replicating to the "secondary" /new server.
Hoping for some guidance out there!!!
TLDR: DFS replication is slow/ non-existant. DFS shares with mapped drives & folder redirection behave oddly.
-Brian
5 Replies.
Welcome to the community!
I started reading about DFS and it seems like a great idea. No more server names in shares! Replication! Redundancy! Hooray!
TLDR: DFS replication is slow/ non-existant. DFS shares with mapped drives & folder redirection behave oddly.
I think this thread can help you with the definition of what is DFS replication.
For replication, consider Hyper-V Replica or even Veeam B&R. Since you have two servers, get resiliency and overall availability by building a hyper-converged cluster....
Hey folks,
Here's a little update.
I changed the variable to %LOGONUSER% -- didn't seem to make any difference, and nothing broke.
I had to make some changes to DFS to ensure replication would happen.
The staging and conflict folders were way too small.
I set the new server as first priority and old server as last priority.
This seemed to clear up almost all replication discrepencies between the two servers.
Moving on:
I tested changing the home drive mapping in GPO to \\domain\users$\%LOGONUSER% and of course it worked flawlessly in the lab.
Home drive permissions were correct, no issues or latency with folder redirection. All was well.
So, of course, when I started to change the GPO in production, things went sideways.
A _lot_ of users were getting BSOD after logging in.
The event log wasn't super helpful, I can post the WER event if anyone wants to look at it.
Moving forward, I have had some luck by removing the home drive mapping from GPO and changing the user object in ADUC / Profile.
This appears to be working, but some of my guinea pig users are getting saddled with extremely long login times ~30 minutes.
I can't find a reason for this. The long wait times don't seem to correllate to the number of files on the home drive, or permissions being set.
I'm hesitant to implement the changes on a wide scale because I don't want my user base staring at a welcome notice for an extended time.
That's when they start trying to "fix" things themselves.
<shudder>
Any thoughts are appreciated!
Thanks,
Brian