Odd problem. I'm working at a customer who asked me to implement a domain DFS namespace to unite all the shares of all departments across all locations (throughout Europe) on his W2K8R2 domain.
The namespace is "Departments". The business is very consistent across all locations, and each of the departments exists at each location. So, for example, there's an "IT" department in each of the 4 locations. The locations have 3-letter codes like BUL, GOS, KRM or KYJ. The customer wants to see this as \domain.com\departments\IT\BUL.
I created a namespace "departments" added folders below named for each department (IT, Engineering, Quality etc.) added folders below for each location (BUL, GOS etc.) then finally added target shares on the various servers hosting data for the departments in each location.
I can navigate as expected through the namespace hierachy, but here's the problem. If I navigate to \domain.com\departments\engineering, I see shortcuts to BUL, GOS, KRM and KYJ in the right panel of Explorer just as expected. However if I navigate to other folders such as \domain.com\departments\IT I see in addition an extra unexpected shortcut ".DFSFolderLink"! Even worse, if I then drill further down into a location I sometimes see not only the contents of the target share but another set of shortcuts to ALL locations AND that ".DFSFolderLink"! Trying to drill down further into these strange shortcuts errors with "Element not found". The spurious shortcuts cannot be deleted either "Error 0x80070490: Element not found".
The odd thing is that some department folders behave exactly as expected and others have some or all of these extra shortcuts.
I set up the whole namespace with scripts, because in reality there are many more locations and departments than I describe here, but scripting it means all this has been set up in a very consistent way.
I believe I'm correct in stating that DFS sets up symbolic links in the DFSRoots folder on the server that hosts the namespace. I have the feeling that somehow it seems that extra spurious symbolic links are present, maybe wrongly defined in the AD, but I don't want to influence any ideas or suggestions from you guys.
Anyone any ideas?
