DFS is your friend

Distributed File System is a trick that Microsoft borrowed from Unix and incorporated it in Windows 2000. If you read the Microsoft standard blurbs they make it sound like something for the big guys with split offices and big, complicated WAN systems so most small businesses ignore it. Don’t! DFS can make your life easier in the long run.

DFS is painful to setup at the beginning but it can save you a ton of time later. Networks are never static, even in a small office that only has one or two servers. Servers are added, removed, burst into flames, run out of space, and generally come and go from your network over time. So, if you have trained your end users, trained your desktop software, and installed applications from one particular server, you have problems when one server has to take on a new role.

DFS sidesteps that problem by tying applications and data to the domain name. Instead of \\NTServer01\SharedData, you place your data in \\domain.local\SharedData and DFS tells the users where to actually pull data

Here’s the story of one client that had file server called CLIENTS where all of they’re project files lived, alphabetically organized. They were a graphics design firm with PhotoShop and Illustrator as their primary software so their files were huge. They maxed out and then outgrew CLIENTS in a year after purchasing it so they bought a second server and renamed them as CLIENTS-A-L and CLIENTS-M-Z (no, really, those were their actual NetBIOS names). So, everyone had to relearn where their files were, redo the network logon scripts, and redo the linked images inside their PhotoShop projects.

Servers are added, removed, they die, run out of space, and generally come and go from your network over time. By setting up DFS first, you can avoid a lot of work later on.