We've had a namespace in place for over a year and it's worked fine.
Until last Thursday when a couple of client PCs could still see the namespace but with almost NO contents.
Looking at the local paths on the member servers shows them to be full of the data we'd expect to see...but you can't see them when browsing to the namespace.
The only things you can see are two linked folders, one of which matches the name of the replicated source folder. If you browse in to that link you can then see the expected contents. Look at the properties of one of the folders and choose the DFS tab all you see listed is the source server, not the member servers.
This behaviour appears to be only true in our London office. The namespace behaviour in our New York and Hong Kong offices is as it should be. Specifically, the namespace is fully populated, the DFS referral list shows all the member servers I'd expect to see and as the New York member server is currently down the NY client PC is connecting to the Hong Kong member server for its DFS data.
So far I've found only two London PCs that can see the data in the namespace. All clients are Windows 7. There's only one subnet per site (so the two working clients are on the same subnet as all the other PCs).
To try to resolve we have- restarted the DFS Namespace service on the Windows Server 2008 DCs, and the Distributed File System service on the Server 2003 DCs,
- set the DFS Namespace service to Delayed Start and rebooted the FSMO role holder DC,
- Ran "dfsutil /PktFlush", "dfsutil /SpcFlush" and "dfsutil /PurgeMupCache" on a 'broken' client PC