[justsomehnguy]

Two days ago one (!) User reported they got \\contso.com\dfsroot\profiles\user inaccessible (with errors loading the desktop etc).

For me the path was accessible, logging on the same server proved the path was accessible, 3 hours of the proper troubleshooting confirmed everything should work. But yet.

Skipping short the circumstances, one of (the 6 total) DCs decided what... DNS server isn't worth running. And for this one user DFS (last changed at least two years ago) decided to fall back to the file server from 2018, which, of course, pointed the DFS target to a no longer existant share.

Of course it wasn't DNS in this case. It was the DNS in this one.

[xist]

DFS-N != DNS

a.) lack of monitoring for running services b.) cruft/old configurations

[justsomehnguy]

It was inavailable DNS server which triggered changing to an old DFS-N server. People on the same RDS server were working fine and did for literally years.