Well, it's resolved in that we made the symptoms go away. Not sure of the cause.
The solution was to delete the DFS link to school1 and then recreate it. Voila--all worked again. Why? Well, as best Microsoft can figure, there was a problem with the blob for that link (look at me, talking as if I know just what a "blob" is). However, the nature of that problem caused it to not be an issue until recent OS patches (e.g., XP SP3). Prior to those patches, the blob error didn't create any problems for client computers. MS got a bunch of trace data, server system states, etc. from me to try to recreate the issue on their end and figure out exactly what the blob problem was, and why it only affects client machines with newer patch levels. But in the mean time, at least I'm back up and running. John -----Original Message----- From: John Hornbuckle Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 3:03 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> ~
