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The Microsoft Distributed File System, or DFS, is a set of client and server services that allow a large enterprise to organize many distributed SMB file shares into a distributed file system. DFS provides location transparency and redundancy to improve data availability in the face of failure or heavy load by allowing shares in multiple different locations to be logically grouped under one folder, or DFS root. Server Message Block (SMB) is an application-level network protocol mainly applied to shared access to files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. ...
// For the Microsoft distributed file system (DFS), see Distributed File System (Microsoft). ...
Microsoft's DFS is referred to interchangeably as 'DFS' and 'Dfs' by Microsoft and is unrelated to the DCE Distributed File System. The DCE Distributed File System (DCE/DFS) is the remote file access protocol used with the Distributed Computing Environment. ...
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When users try to access a share that exists off the DFS root, the user is really looking at a DFS link and the DFS server transparently redirects them to the correct file server and share.
A DFS root can only exist on a Windows 2000 version that is part of the server family, or on Windows Server 2003. Windows 2000 can only host one DFS root per server, while Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Datacenter Edition can host multiple DFS roots on the same server. (A Samba server can also host the root of a DFS.) Windows 2000 (also referred to as Win2K) is a preemptive, interruptible, graphical and business-oriented operating system that was designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor 32-bit Intel x86 computers. ...
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. ...
Samba logo. ...
There are two ways of implementing DFS on Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003:
- Standalone DFS roots allow for a DFS root that exists only on the local computer, and thus does not use Active Directory. A Standalone DFS can only be accessed on the computer which it is created. It doesn't offer any fault tolerance and cannot be linked to any other DFS.
- Domain-based DFS roots exist within Active Directory and can have their information distributed to other domain controllers within the domain — this provides fault tolerance to DFS. DFS roots that exist on a domain must be hosted on a domain controller. This is to ensure that links with the same target get all their information replicated over the network. The file and root information is replicated via the Microsoft File Replication Service (FRS).
Enhanced DFS management and RDC (Remote differential compression) are part of the "branch office server management" features added to Windows Server 2003 in the R2 release in 2006 [citation needed]. Typically Active Directory is managed using the graphical Microsoft Management Console. ...
File Replication Service is a Microsoft service for distributing folders stored in the SYSVOL shared folder on domain controllers and Microsoft Distributed File System (DFS) shared folders. ...
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft. ...
Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday (link displays full 2006 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Versions 2.6 and later of the Linux kernel come with a SMB client VFS called "cifs" that supports DFS. The Linux kernel is a Unix-like operating system kernel. ...
A virtual file system (VFS) or virtual filesystem switch is an abstraction layer on top of a more concrete file system. ...
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