The short question is why would Offline Files fail only on some systems when all configurations seem identical? Here's the scenario:
We have Roaming Profiles and Folder Redirection deployed to our Win7 clients. The redirects are pointing to a 2008 R2 File Server via DFS Namespaces. Online, it all works beautifully. However, a few dozen of our users have laptops that go off-network. We are experiencing a failure to transition to offline files with some of these systems when they go offline.
In our attempts to locate and correct the issue we've discovered the following:
- It's system-specific (fails for all users sync'd on that system and same user profiles work fine on other systems)
- It's not hardware-specific as we have successes and failures across all model types
- It doesn't seem to be a missing update, hotfix, or driver update (SCCM & manual checks have pretty much ruled this out although there are a lot out there when considering Offline Files and DFS)
- It's Related to DFS. If we change the GP on a failing machine and circumvent the namespace it works.
- Affected systems transition to Offline Files just fine if the user is logged in when the system goes offline.
- When a user attempts to logs into a disconnect computer (starting offline), Offline Files are, for lack of a better description, very confused (see below)
For this last part, we're seeing the following behavior from Sync Center & the local OS:
- The user's profile and folder redirects fail at login (Error: The folder path refers to a location that is unavailable...)
- Under Sync Center Offline Files show as disconnected but it errors when trying to traverse the folder
- When traversing the share path online all directory levels show as "always available offline", however when traversing offline, the root directory shows as offline/available but the next level of subfolders show as online/not available and are not traversable.
- When traversing the share path offline via CMD the path shows as offline at all traversable levels (although there is still the single-subfolder limitation)
We've been beating our heads over this for a week and will take any insight we can get! I can provide any of the specific GP details, ACL configs or other details upon request.
Thanks!