How to observe the DFS failover

Question

_{Friday, November 22, 2019 2:53 PM}

I have two windows server 2012(here called win1,win2).  One is DC(win1). And the other is its member.  on win1, I create DFS name space and two targets. one point to the samba share on win1. The other points to the samba share on win2.  And on win2, I don't create DFS name space. How can I test the DFS failover? What else do I need to setup for win1 and win2?

Thanks.

All replies (2)

_{Friday, November 22, 2019 4:30 PM ✅Answered}

Hello,

There's no need to configure/setup anything else in your case, this is what makes DFS Namespaces easy.

All you have to do is to add another DFS Namespace server and enable it and you will have automatic failover, assuming you have the folder targets on multiple locations.

The easiest way to test the failover is to disable one of the DFS Namespace servers, in the DFS Management console, select your namespace, then go to the Namespace Servers tab, right-click the DFS Namespace server you want to disable and select Disable Namespace Server.

By default the referrals have a cache value of 300 seconds (5 minutes), this means that clients will have the "old" DFS Namespace server in the cache for up to 5 minutes.

You can change this referral cache by right-clicking your namespace > Properties > Referrals.

You can also easily check which DFS Namespace server your clients/servers are communicating to with the help of the DFSDiag.exe (this is only located on the DFS Namespace servers under C:\Windows\System32\.

You can for example copy the DFSDiag.exe file and run various of commands to check the referral statuses etc.

Here's a good blog post describing this:
Five ways to check your DFS-Namespaces (DFS-N) configuration with the DFSDIAG.EXE tool
Example:

DFSDiag.exe /TestReferral /DFSPath:\\mydomain.com\DFS

Best regards,
Leon

Blog: https://thesystemcenterblog.com LinkedIn:

_{Saturday, November 23, 2019 2:29 AM}

Thanks Leon so much. Your answer is so clearly. As before, I thought DFS failover was happened when the target(samba share) can't access.