"Allow caching of share" is enabled on root DFS share. What happens if I disable this?

Question

We recently inherited a customer who has had DFS-N & DFS-R running for years. Two servers separated by SDWAN. Have been fighting the typical "offline files with DFS" issues.

Last night, we discovered that, by disabling Offline Files on two different domain-based PCs - which forced a reboot, the issues we were consistently seeing completely disappeared.

After more digging, we discovered that there was a root DFS share (Server Manager...Files and Storage Services...Shares) pointing to E:\DFSRoots\DFS. Upon checking the properties of this share, we find that the "Allow caching of share" is checked on both servers.

![271194-root-dfs-share.jpg][1]

1. Is it possible that his is causing our "Offline Files" issues? If we uncheck this property, might this address our issue?
   I've seen lots of articles advising not to enable Offline Files with DFS.
2. What happens if I uncheck this box? Could this be at least one of the root causes? Will there be customer impact (Namespace goes offline, server reboot, etc.)?
3. Should I do the remote server first, then the primary, local server?
4. Any other gotchas I might not be considering?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi,

Thank you for posting your query.

Kindly follow the steps provided below to resolve your issue.

This article provides a solution to solve Distributed File System Namespace (DFSN) access failures.

Go to this link for your reference and other troubleshooting procedures https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/networking/dfsn-access-failures

Do not hesitate to message us if you need further assistance.

If the answer is helpful kindly click "Accept as Answer" and up vote it.