My Documents Redirection & Offline Files

[dctaylorit]

Hello all,

I’m new to the forum and I’ve been able to find some answers on here before with quite a bit of luck. I tried doing some searching on this and was not able to find anything that was the information I needed so I figured I’d join and ask away.

We are currently running a Domain with 5 sites across the country with a little over 100 employees. They are all connected via dedicated T1’s. Each site has its own SDC with primary one located here in the corporate office. They are all running Server 2003 SP1. All clients are using XP SP2 with all recent updates.

We currently have group policy redirecting the user’s “My Documents” folder back to the userhome’s. This is working great with the exception of about 7-10 users who travel to other offices quite frequently. When they are in those offices they are having a difficult time accessing their “My Documents” because it is trying to use the copy on their home server instead of the local copy on their laptops. It is taking quite a long time across the WAN links and the users are becoming very frustrated with this for obvious reasons.

I’ve looked into a couple of settings within group policies to see if there is anyway we can force the laptop to go into “Offline” mode and only use the local copy of “My Docs” instead of going across the WAN to access them.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get to successfully work. I’ve tried setting up the following policies to no avail.

Computer Configuration:

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Network\Offline Files\

Configure Slow link Speed

Enabled

Value: 20000

Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy\

Group Policy slow link detection

Enabled

Value: 2000

User Configuration:

User Configuration\Administrative Templates\System\Group Policy\

Group Policy slow link detection

Enabled

Value: 2000

From what I’ve read it appears if the client determines it is on a slow link that it will not apply the folder redirection policy. So I was trying to increase slow link speed (default is 500) so that it is above the speed of the T1 lines and therefore appears as though it is on a slow link.

Unfortunately for the few people who travel to the other offices they are still running into this issue. I’m not real sure where to go from here to find a solution. Thankfully they are being very patient with this issue.

If anyone has any suggestions I’m very open to hear them. Thank you all for reading all of this I know it was very long winded. If you have any questions please don’t be afraid to ask.

Thanks,

- Joe

[cluberti]

Note that slow link speed is determined by the speed of the local site DC if the machine logging in is able to connect to the local site DC - meaning that if the laptop connects to the local site DC at 10 or 100Mb, slow link detection will detect a "fast" link.

Have you instead considered using DFS to replicate the problem userhome's to all file servers (or at least all DCs) in your domain, so that the roaming user would always have a "local" copy of their userhome on the local site file server or DC?

[dctaylorit]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Now that you mention that it makes sense as to why it wasn't working.

DFS is something that we have considered. Unfortunately we've been going through alot of changes as of late and have not gotten to take as indepth of look as we'd of like to with it yet.

Is there any other way that you could think of in the mean time to allow the users to use a local copy of the file while in another office. I'd prefer not to allow them to have the ability to turn on offline files but unfortunately now I think that is the only option.

Thanks again for the quick respoinse.

- Joe

Edited January 22, 2007 by dctaylorit

[cluberti]

You will be hard-pressed to keep them from seeing the delay without a DFS infrastructure or offline files. I strongly suggest you consider 2K3 R2 and DFS for your issue, but in the meantime, offline files.

[dctaylorit]

Thanks again for all of your help. I think we are going to try and look into the DFS solution for this issue as well as to help with backup.

Thanks for your help and quick reply

-Joe

[rathcoffey]

Hi there

I am having the same issue with OFS and slow WAN links. I've tried site GPOs also to no avail.

DFS is an option however, any new files (especially) large ones added to the root will result in replication and this will slow up OFS just as much.

I'm currently testing disabling SMB (Server Message Block on the default Domain GPO. MS have stated that this should improve this issue.

Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options

I'll let you know how I go

Mark