Basically it is a service on a fileserver where you create a share, and mount other shares inside of it.

if you have g: \\server\share1 h: \\server\share2 i: \\server\share3

the user connects to the \\server\dfsshare map as s: (for example) and in then sees
s:\share1 s:\share2 s:\share3 etc.

those shares(1-3) can come from any server on your lan

You are effectively changing share letters into folder structure... think of it kind of like the win95 issue of shared home folders. The user connects to a share where all their resources are located inside of it.

Maybe you can have a solution, but not really the better one : Use of NTFS diretory redirection : you can have a directory in a ntfs drive that is pointing to another directory or drive of the server. The two must be in NTFS. In fact, it's nothing else than the Unix link system on w2k.

Also, if i'm remember, DFS is doing the same thing, and more easier, but the DFS client have to be installed

dfs actually gathers all the shares. it is a solution but not what I had in mind ...

The hardlinks are working only with local ntfs volumes

[ 02 February 2002: Message edited by: novastar ]

[edit]
Maybe you can get a look to cygwin, as it offers the same possibilities than NTFS hardpoint, but i dunno if it can work with network drives.

[ 02 February 2002: Message edited by: Alex.H ]

- Kent

Beyond that you are SOL.

Therefore you have very few options...

DFS -- or something like it

Deploying via sharenames (like populating My Network Places or desktop shortcuts)

and the most reasonable, yet more time consuming chore of redisigning the share structure to a more efficient plan, in which your users do not need to have 23 shares

[ 02 February 2002: Message edited by: Radimus ]

Then again, there's always UNC. What's this fixation on drive letters anyway?

Then again, there are some apps that must have a drive letter to access their stuff, UNC will throw them. They are probably very old and no longer supported by the writers.

What ever the problem is, 26 is really all that anyone SHOULD need, most likely the problem is an inefficient structure where a thousand little things are shared and mapped to their own letter...

This is a Network Administrator's problem, where SOMEONE needs to move/maintain their network and design things efficiently. DFS is a partial solution, and an easy way to keep the users connected to their resources, while things are being moved around...

I have had the same problem in the past. The design we had was the home drive,apps drive and 4 data drives were mapped by default, then application specific mappings would each have a letter associated with them. Eventually though, we had more applications than drive letters.
The way we got round it was to duplicate letters for applications that were not used together - e.g. Finance people were unlikely to use a high resolution mapping tool that we use.
I know it is not a solution but I'm afraid it is all we could come up with

Mostly we see reserved mappings for
- drive for main applications.
- drives for special applications f.e. old DOS applications.
- home drive.
- drive of your main department.
- drives for sub departments. mostly necessary for people with more functions.
- drive for temporary files. mostly useful for temporary storage and
fast sharing data.
The possible problem with reserved letters for old DOS applications can
be solved by using a BAT file. This BAT we remap a drive before starting
DOS application.
Also it isn't - in our opinion for 'simple' end-users - necessary to have
knoweldge which drives are mapped. We create related shortcuts on the
desktop and in some cases we prevent the possibility to search through
available drives (drives are hidden for explorer).

A more complex problem for OLD software can be the usage of network
printers and printer types.
greetings.

I had a similar problem and ended up making a Common$ share and mapping everyone to that and just setting NTFS perms on the specific directories. that helped a lot, but when split to two locations, using DFS helped with accessing distributed resources.

-Frank

UNC was the first solution, DFS is the current solution