Want to reduce administration time and user frustration? Streamline your network file sharing with DFS. Jesse Smith tells you how to set up a DFS root, and you’ll learn some good practices for managing one or more DFS roots on your network.
Organizing Shares with Windows Server 2003 DFS
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
DFS is great. Allows you to move share points from server to server with minimum down time. We use it to share data nationaly and globally among Asia, Europe, and America. OS/2 domains allowed shares to be at the domain level, about time Microsoft implemented it
. Now lets hope they get on board with printing….
Jim
DFS is a product of IBM/Transarc, dfs (lower case) is Microsofts clone using dcerpc.
nt
hasn’t UNIX been doing this exact thing for years?
Unix specifically? No. AFS, coda, and the like? Yes.
DFS requires systems to be members of the domain from what I’ve seen. This creates problems for environments where there are VPN users or temporary systems connecting with non-domain computers that must reach DFS resources. Not a problem for everyone but can be a butt-biter if you find out the hard way.
Microsoft’s ‘dfs’ is not really a distributed file system. It’s more of a naming and redirection service.