DFS - Naming description of a drive mapped through the Domain Root

[Guest IanR]

Infrastructure is 2003 DCs, nearly all 2003 file servers and XP Sp2 clients.

 

When mapping a drive to one of the DFS root shares on the Domain DFS (e.g.

\\contoso.com\public) the extended name displayed within Explorer shows an

off-site DC name. The public share has multiple links to servers in every

site.

 

To try and make this a little clearer if we have DCs in New York, Chicago

and Seattle called NYDC, CDC and SDC and I am in the New York site, when I

map to the DFS share \\contoso.com\public the drive letter will show the

contents of the Computer Description field of the Seattle DC or the Chicago

DC next to the drive letter.

 

I've traced the network traffic and it shows the initial contoso.com lookup

goes to NYDC. The public share is hosted on multiple file servers and the

correct file server (within the NY site) is returned and this is the server

used for any further file access. In fact all of the DFS information seems to

return the local site resources first as I'd expect.

 

It doesn't seem that the naming has any ill effect but I have been unable to

see any lookups that leave the local site DC and Fileservers and I cannot see

why it labels the drive as "Seattle DC" (in this example). Any further

mappings to other DFS shares at the same level (e.g \\contoso.com\private)

also seem to use the same off-site computer description.

 

Anyone seen this elsewhere?

[Guest IanR]

RE: DFS - Naming description of a drive mapped through the Domain Root

 

I finally tracked the cause of the errant label.

 

The descriptive label that Explorer displays is located in

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ComputerDescriptions

 

Within that key there was a value for contoso.com. The data in this value

was the misleading title that was displayed next to the mapped drive letter.

 

Clearing out the data but leaving the value in place removes the label.

Removing the value entirely will result in the client recreating the value

(seemingly randomly) from available DCs