We have a small company with 2 locations. The main location is currently running Win Server 2003. The secondary location is currently running the Small Business Server. We also have a remote server currently running Linux. What we'd like to do is replace the remote Linux server with a Windows server and allow remote users to access data directly from it securely. Therefore, is should be part of the domain AD. Also, we'd like to replicate the file data between the remote and main server and allow users to switch to the remote server in the event the main server goes down either from a hardware failure or a massive disaster. What we don't know is precisely which Windows Server product we need to accomplish this, whether we'll need to upgrade the main server as well, and how to configure the beast once it's purchased. Any help, especially on the correct product to buy, would be greatly appreciated. Arek S.

Hi, It sounds like DFS/DFS Replication are probably going to be your best bet, here is some info to get started with. Preliminarily it would seem that you want to start out with 2 AD sites (since DFS locates the nearest servers using configured AD sites/subnets and fails over to a remote site if a local DFS replica cannot be contacted). http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/dfs/default.mspx Feel free to ask if you have any questions as you are looking at the documentation and/or prototyping a solution. -- Mike Burr

Thanks for this, it does look like this is the direction we should be going. Is there a way for a user to authenticate to the remote server securely and map a drive without using a VPN or FTP with an add-on like WebDrive? I'm assuming, from the documentation, that the fail-over features mentioned require both servers to be on the same network. If this is not so, please correct me. Arek S.

No, All of the information is derived from Active Directory, so you create a namespace and a few shares such Folder1, Folder2, Folder3, (assuming your domain is contoso.com). These may be hosted on one or more file servers in one or more sites, replicated using DFS-R. This is somewhat independent of the access method, as you may secure it with one or more technologies such as IPSec or VPN. The key is ensuring that the servers are accessible from a routing perspective based on the remote access method that you use. When users access \\contoso.com\Folder1, they receive a referral list based on the site information stored in active directory and they try the servers in the order returned. The order typically consists of local AD site, and then the servers in other sites based off of the costs used for the site-links between the other AD sites. One of the main considerations is also ensuring that firewalls are set up to allow incoming DFS clients that are failing over from another site (that have no accessible server). As far as client support, Windows is the main supported version, but I have heard that there is a plugin for MAC and some Linux versions can support mapping to DFS namespaces. I found the FAQ helpful, http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/dfs/dfsfaq.mspx -- Mike Burr

Many thanks, Mike. Arek S.