a Flo + a Blog = a Flog

I have encountered an interesting follow up about a file and print server outage last week.

We do have a DFS namespace with 2 targets, one in Toronto, one in Montreal.

The DFS target is set on users belonging to the group “DropBox” by a vbs script that adds a link to the DFS referral.

Because DFS is set to select the target based on site costing, Montreal people will be set with the Montreal File&Print(FNP) and Toronto will be set with the Toronto FNP.

Where ever users are a DropBox is always accessible. Documents will be store on the FNP for imaging scans.

However there is a bond in the imaging application that puts document dropped in Toronto as English documents thus put in the queue list of the Toronto users.

As the Montreal FNP became unavailable last week, DFS switched clients targeting to make the active target as Toronto FNP.

This would cause Montreal documents to go in the English queue of Toronto.

However, you can only change the active target when you are an administrator. Users trying to do so manually will face an error “parameter incorrect”.

DFS is not clever enough to failover back to the original.

So I had to use dfsutil to revert back to normal. Dfsutil is available in the winXP support tools.

The easiest solution is to have dfsutil clear the DFS cache.

Note: Erasing the link and having the script recreating it will not change the targeting,

C:\>dfsutil /pktflush
EntryPath=[*]
Done processing this command.

C:\>dfsutil /spcflush
EntryPath=[*]
Done processing this command.

Clearing the cache will cause the client to recheck site costing to find the nearest DFS referral. And voila, all clients are pointing to the right referral server after a little script ran on all the PCs.

So once my problem was cleared I thought I could check that little tool more in depth. And I think checking the MSFT example website is a good ide – here.