We have two sites linked via DFS on Windows 2003 R2.
For some reason at one site all workstations (Win7 and WinXP) tend to connect to the remote site. I can manually make the local server active but after a while - half an hour or so - the connection quietly switches to the remote site.
I can remove all shares and run the logon script manually with no errors.
The eventlog carries no entries indicating an error. Both DCs seem to run fine as well as the local fileserver.
I've studied high and low the TechNet pages about DFS including this:
http:/
but cannot find out how to debug this.
This setup has ran for a couple of years with no issues, so "something" has happened.
The two sites are set up correctly, and the only difference is really that one site (that with the troubles) hosts the PDC while the other DC is at the remote site. At both locations are workstations that are supposed to connect to the local file server. Only if this is down, they should connect to the file server at the other site. The main reason for this is, that the WAN/VPN connection between the two sites are relatively slow 15/1 ADSL2+ lines.
The error is not consistent. Some days ago, when I log on with my admin machine, it connects correctly to the local server. However, on the same machine is a VM virtual XP Mode running. It doesn't borrow any drives from the parent machine
but features it own logon to the domain. It connects to the remote site.
Even when I logon to the local server via RDP, it connects to the DFS shares of the remote server.
At the remote site, workstations logon correctly their local server.
I installed DFSDiag on my Win7 admin machine and ran all test:
/TestDCs
/TestSites
/TestDFSConfig
/TestDFSIntegrity
/TestReferral
They returned nothing but Success except for two warnings:
Validating the site associations on every domain controller of the following: GUSBRINO Warning: The server has IP addresses with conflicting site associations Host name: GUSBRINO Site: Kajen-Pakhus4 Domain controller: ADELAIDE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Host IP address Subnet-SiteMapping in AD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fe80::ec67:6c19:292:50e3%14 No mapping exists ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Warning: The server has IP addresses with conflicting site associations Host name: GUSBRINO Site: Kajen-Pakhus4 Domain controller: ADRIANNE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Host IP address Subnet-SiteMapping in AD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fe80::ec67:6c19:292:50e3%14 No mapping exists ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is because IPv6 is installed on my machine but not implemented anywhere else in our setup. I don't believe this has any influence as this has not been changed recently. Namespace properties -> Referrals Tab -> Ordering Method is not set to Random Order but Lowest Cost Costs have not been changed. Default value is used. I've also double-checked the Eventlogs on both the DCs and on the two file servers but nothing indicates any error. Also, both DCs and file servers have been rebooted and are fully updated. I got the idea to change the referrals: Namespace properties -> Referrals Tab -> Ordering Method from "Lowest Cost" to "Exclude targets outside of the client's site" This changes nothing on the site that works but on the offending site it causes the logon script to fail as soon as it tries to map a driveletter with the error 800704b3 "No network provider accepted the given network path" (or similar, it is localized). A reason could be a DNS error, but NsLookup locates correctly the IP address of the file server. What other reasons could there be? The file server of the offending site is 32-bit while that of the other site is 64-bit. |
Gustav Brock