This is more of a "What am I doing wrong?" sort of thing. Not sure exactly what I've neglected, but clearly, it's "something".
I have recently begun replacing some older branch servers with new Windows 2008 R2 x64 servers. I'm setting up DFS on these servers to help us keep files available consistently at these remote branches. These servers are on a domain, and DFS is set up to take advantage of Active Directory, thus my shares are accessed through (for instance) \\domain\Public.
Right now I have 3 out of 12 total servers online. One server, here at our operations center, I'll refer to as \\primary. This server is the hub in a hub and spoke topology. The other two servers are \\branch1 and \\branch 2. The
branches all live on the other end of a somewhat small WAN pipe, and thus, having large files replicated to the local branch servers is a significant upgrade for our users. It's "faster". They like that idea. Management likes the idea of
"faster" without spending more money to increase our bandwidth.
Everything "seems" to be working on the surface, however, I can tell that it's not exactly right. Perhaps it's just my "understanding" that isn't exactly right. My understanding of how DFS in an AD environment should work is that once set up, a share that is referred to by \\domain\share should look for a local server in the DFS structure to get those files from.
So, I've set up a namespace called Public, where various files are stored. I can START \\domain\Public from a command prompt and get a nice listing of the files in that share. I can START \\primary\Public and see the same thing. I can START \\branch1\Public or \\branch2\Public . . . it all "works", or appears to work. However . . .
Let's say I am on the console for \\branch1, and I do a START \\domain\Public. In theory, it "should" open the folder on that machine. That is clearly not what is happening. When I try to copy a file from that open window to the desktop, it takes much longer than it should. The file is large enough (about 40 meg) that if the copy was local, it should be nearly instant, but going down those little pipes, it's about a 5 minute process.
I'm not sure exactly what I'm missing here, but clearly it's not working the way I think it should work.