We have 2 separate forests, one for corporate and general business and the other for our test labs (an unintended consequence of merging 2 companies). This hasn't been a big problem until we rolled out DFS on the corporate side. The 2 forests trust each other, but we are experiencing sometimes 2 -3 minute delays when connecting to a DFS share when the client hasn't accessed the share in a while. When we look at the DFS client referral caches, the REFERRAL_SVC DFS target list always has the most remote root server on the corp side listed first (corp has 3 sites, 2 are geographically remote). We believe that most of our delays are from attempts to contact the most distant root server (session timeouts, etc. -- the server is in London, client is in Seattle)This opened up the question:
Since the domain hosting the namespace has no way of knowing where the requesting client is (client site is a part of a different (but trusted) forest), how does DFSN determine what order to put the referrals in? Does it arbitrarily assign a local site to a request from a client that is out of domain?
Robert