But the crazy thing is that nothing has changed on that share in terms of permissions (or anything else I'm aware of).
If I can access the share directly (via \\servername\sharename), then permissions must be okay, right? In doing some testing today, it's looking as though the problem appears on XP machines after SP3 is installed. And on Vista, too, the issue appears to be tied to some specific update (although we've not yet figured out which one). But since 99% of the machines at that school are XP, that's what we're focusing on for the moment. One thing I did find was that the share was configured to allow offline files, which I recall reading should be avoided with DFS. So I turned that off a couple of hours ago, but it doesn't seem to have made a difference. I also found a second server at a second school that had offline files enabled for its shared folder, but I've had no problems accessing that one. John -----Original Message----- From: Miller Bonnie L. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 3:39 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Weird DFS Issue Sounds like maybe a dfs root share problem. Check ntfs and share permissions on all the servers sharing the root one at a time and see if any are down, not configured correctly, or otherwise inaccessible. DFSutil might be handy as well. -Bonnie -----Original Message----- From: John Hornbuckle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 12:03 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Weird DFS Issue Quick background... At each school, I have a server with a shared directory. I use DFS to make these accessible to everyone under an "F:" drive, and every user has F: mapped to \\mydomain\dfs. That way users at school1 find their stuff under f:\school1, users at school2 find it under f:\school2, and so on. Some time back--I don't recall exactly when--I stopped being able to access one of my school's stuff from my Vista machine via the F: drive. Whenever I go to f:\school1 I get this dialog box: "f:\school1 is not accessible. Element not found." I have no problem directly accessing the share (i.e., going to \\school1server\shareddirectory), but I can't get to it via DFS. Neither through the F: drive nor through \\mydomain\dfs\school1. On this Vista machine I'm running an XP virtual machine. Interestingly, from that virtual machine I've had no problems accessing f:\school1. Until now. Now from the XP virtual machine when I go to f:\school1, I get: "f:\school1 is not accessible. Configuration information could not be read from the domain controller, either because the machine is unavailable, or access has been denied." And now I'm starting to see computers at that school have the same problem accessing their stuff via DFS. Not all of the computers, but some. We're working on determining a pattern. >From within the DFS utility, all looks good. School1's share shows up as being online in the DFS management utility. I have no clue where to go from here. Any suggestions? John Hornbuckle MIS Department Taylor County School District 318 North Clark Street Perry, FL 32347 www.taylor.k12.fl.us ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~ ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~ ~ Upgrade to Next Generation Antispam/Antivirus with Ninja! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbelt-software.com/SunbeltMessagingNinja.cfm> ~
