I apologize in advance for the rambling novella, but I tried to include as many details ahead of time as I could.
I guess like most issues, this one's been evolving for a while, it started out with us trying to add a new member
to a replication group that's on a subnet without connectivity to the FSMO roles holder. I'll try to describe the
layout as best as I can up front.
The AD only has one domain & both the forest & domain are at 2008R2 function level. We've got two sites defined in
Sites & Services, Site A is an off-site datacenter with one associated subnet & Site B with 6 associated subnets, A-F.
The two sites are connected by a WAN link from a cable provider. Subnets E & F at Site B have no connectivity to Site A
across that WAN, only what's available through the front side of the datacenter through the public Internet. The network
engineering group involved refuses to route that WAN traffic to those two subnets & we've got no recourse against that
decision; so I'm trying to find a way to accomplish this without that if possible.
The FSMO roles holder is located at Site A. I know that I can define a Site C, add Subnets E & F to that site, & then
configure an SMTP site link between Sites A & C, but that only handles AD replication, correct? That still wouldn't allow me, for example,
to enumerate DFS namespaces from subnets E & F, or to add a fileserver on either of those subnets as a member to an existing
DFS replication group, right? Also, root scalability is enabled on all the namespace shares.
Is there a way to accomplish both of these things without transferring the FSMO roles from the original DC at Site A to, say,
the bridgehead DC at Site B?
When the infrastructure was originally setup by a former analyst, the topology was much more simple & everything was left
under the Default First Site & no sites/subnets were setup until fairly recently to resolve authentication issues on
Subnets E & F... I bring this up just to say, the FSMO roles holder has held them throughout the build out & addition of
all sorts of systems & I'm honestly not sure what, if anything, the transfer of those roles will break.
I definitely don't claim to be an expert in any of this, I'll be the first to say that I'm a work-in-progress on this AD design stuff,
I'm all for R'ing the FM, but frankly I'm dragging bottom at this point in finding the right FM. I've been digging around
on Google, forums, & TechNet for the past week or so as this has evolved, but no resolution yet.
On VMs & machines on subnets E & F when I go to DFS Management -> Namespace -> Add Namespaces to Display..., none show up
automatically & when I click Show Namespaces, after a few seconds I get "The namespaces on DOMAIN cannot be enumerated. The
specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted". If I run a dfsutil /pktinfo, nothing shows except \sysvol
but I can access the domain-based DFS shares through Windows Explorer with the UNC path \\DOMAIN-FQDN\Share-Name then when
I run a dfsutil /pktinfo it shows all the shares that I've accessed so far.
So either I'm doing something wrong, or, for some random large, multinational company, every sunbet & fileserver one wants
to add to a DFS Namespace has to be able to contact the FSMO roles holder? Or, are those ADs broken down with a child domain
for each Site & a FSMO roles holder for that child domain is located in each site?