Twice we have experienced problems with our DFS shares, both times we discovered that there was one server with a share problem. If we tried to open a share from that server we got a logon prompt. The fastest fix was to rename the DFS folder and the new one was replicated in minutes.
There was about a year between the first and the second time we had this problem.
The problem is that our Citrix environment is built on DFS shares. Both times when we got this DFS problem we couldn’t find the cause straight away, it took some hours to discover it was DFS. This problem got a big impact on our production environment.
Lately I create a lot of Powershell scripts that checks the status of something. If we got a problem with something (like Exchange) then I search for the symptoms of how I can recognize it with Powershell. The output of those scripts is returned to the monitoring tool Nagios.
I want to create a check for this DFS problem, so when it occurs we get an alarm from Nagios and we can fix it right away with less impact for our users. The problem is that I don’t have a lot of information about recognizing the symptoms of this DFS problem.
The only thing I know that there is a login prompt of accessing the share on per server.
The second problem is that I can’t test it, because I can’t and don’t to force a corruption on the DFS share.
I found someone that created a check based on writing a file to a DFS share and checked that date stamp of the file. For now it is my best option.
I’m wondering if there is someone that got a better idea or if somebody does know more symptoms about recognising this specific DFS problem. (Events (we couldn’t find them), errors in a log file)
