Unity Migration Blog

The sluggishness experienced while deleting a large number of profile and home directory folders on FS03 was due to the File Server Resource Manager. This is the service that maintains and keeps track of the quotas.

We are using the automatic quota feature so it knows when a directory is created or deleted under a directory it is set to manage. The service writes to files in "P:\System Volume Information\SRM" whenever a quota is set or unset.

Stopping the File Server Resource Manager service while performing bulk deletes caused the sluggish performance to improve substantially.

With few folks using the FS servers today, I'll be changing the IP numbers to the .7 subnet/ vlan 11. The main delay with the outage will be for the switch VLAN settings to catch up with the server IP number change.

NOC had to encourage the DNS propagation of the change for FS03 - about 1.6 hours after initial submission.

Seems DFS is slow in making the adjustment, as well. -- Joe W.

Weekly defragmentation of the two local partitions for the DC and FS servers has been scheduled for the 4 & 5 AM time frame. WSUS00 runs the process in in 9 PM time frame weekly.

I'll add the script to the other servers in the near future.
-- Joe W.

New home directories have been created for all Unity users. These directories are intended to be used as the user's see fit. They will NOT be used for roaming profile data. We intend to enhance and grow the home directories in the future to provide larger amounts of space that is easily available on Windows computes (and others). The home directories reside under \\unity.ad.ncsu.edu\itd\home in directories named a-z. The a-z directories are actually DFS links. This way, the actual directories for the different letters can be volumes which can be moved to different servers for load balancing. The directories currently all reside on 1 volume - \\fs03\home. This will eventually change. Users have Modify permissions on their own directory. Users do not have permissions to list directories under a-z. The user's home directory will be mapped to U: in the new environment.

Some departments may choose to use roaming profiles in the new Active Directory environment. We do not want profile data (mainly the user part of the registry) to be included in users' home direcctories. As a result, profile directories have also been created for all Unity users in the same manner that the home directories are created. The profile directories are not currently linked in DFS because we don't want to make this space obviously available to the users.

Automatic directory quotas have been set for a-z for both home and profile directories. Home directories have a default quota of 100 MB. Profile directories have a default quota of 50 MB. Patrick posted some information about directory quotas here:

http://microsys.unity.ncsu.edu/blog/index.php?title=about_quotas&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Read up on directory quotas if you are not familiar with this new feature of Windows Server 2003 R2. There is some good information on Microsoft's site.

I've made a new GPO and associated it to the Microsys "File" servers.
It sets DFS to use DNS for it's name resolution, rather than NetBIOS.

The .adm file used to create this preference (it's a preference, not a policy, as it doesn't live in the Policy subtree of the registry) is in \\Unity.ad.ncsu.edu\itd\Share\ADM Templates with the .adm files that Andy has already created.

In order to actually see it, you will need to go to View|Filter and uncheck the "Show only policies that can be completely managed."

I think this might be a good policy to apply to all of our servers, not just the ones specifically associated with DFS. I think that the member servers are involved with passing referrals about with the DFS servers, and so having them all using DNS would seem to be a good thing.