DFS not working properly over VPN for personal computers

We recently switched to a new VPN server after Mac OS dropped support for PPTP and because we were way overdue to do it anyway. Since then personal computers were unable to access network shares via DFS.

They could go directly to the file server and that would work.

Users who connected to VPN with a organization owned laptops were able to use DFS.

After some digging it turned out the issue was our old VPN allowed for WINS (yes yes I know) and our new VPN has WINS disabled (by design, see… we’re trying)

The proper solution to this problem is to re-configure DFS to use DNS only: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/244380/how-to-configure-dfs-to-use-fully-qualified-domain-names-in-referrals

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to implement this.

What we ended up doing is re-configured the DHCP scope to set VPN users DNS Suffix to ‘vpn.mydomain.com’

I then added aliases for all of our file servers and DFS servers under ‘vpn.mydomain.com’. Example:

  • fileserver1.vpn.mydomain.com, CNAME, fileserver1.it.mydomain.com
  • dfsserver1.vpn.mydomain.com, CNAME, dfsserver1.it.mydomain.com

This is a crappy hacky work around that isn’t really sustainable but will work for now until we can sit down and plan changing our DFS over to use DNS only.

Domain Computers worked fine because we use group policy to push out multiple DNS search suffixes. DHCP doesn’t allow you to do this with Windows PCs so when they try to lookup ‘fileserver1’ they would try to hit WINS if implemented and then append their DNS suffix (vpn.mydomain.com) and then fail to find the file server resulting in a “Network Path Not Found” errors.

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