DFS, Server Shares and Network Mapped drives at Puffing Billy

The article is a quick guide to DFS, Server Shares and network mapped drives at Puffing Billy.

The DFS Namespace path for Puffing Billy is \\PBR.ORG.AU\PBRDFS.

Currently DFS Namespace and DFS Replication roles are installed on the following servers:

• PBR-DC-B1
• PBR-DC-B2
• PBR-DC-KL1
• PBR-DC-KL2
• PBR-FS-B1
• PBR-FS-KL1

The active namespace servers are currently:

• PBR-DC-B1
• PBR-DC-B2
• PBR-DC-KL1
• PBR-DC-KL2

Having multiple namespace servers ensures the DFS paths are active in the event that one of the other DCs goes down.

There are a number of folder targets set under the DFS path \\pbr.org.au\pbrdfs\drives. The path \\pbr.org.au\pbrdfs\drives is essentially a fictional folder path. Under \\pbr.org.au\pbrdfs\drives are the actual folders and shares to other file servers and shares. All \\pbr.org.au\pbrdfs\drives does is redirect to point to these shares using this path. 

For example, the below screenshot shows the edrive selected. The actual location of the edrive is \\pbr-fs-kl1\edrive and is a windows server share hosted on the Kilvington file server.

I have added the \\pbr-fs-kl1\edrive as a folder target to DFS so when i map to \\pbr.org.au\pbrdfs\drives\edrive I am essentially viewing files on \\pbr-fs-kl1\edrive.

Network mapped drives are set through Group Policy. The group Policy object which sets this is "Mapped Network Drives". Please ignore the other GPOs labelled Mapped Drives, these are legacy.

The Mapped drive will all reference DFS paths as shown below: