DFS: Manual removal of a DFS Link.

It can happen to everybody. A DFS Link gets deleted in the wrong way by accident, and now it's stale sources are being a burden in your DFSroots directory. This can happen due to errors in namespace replication or unclean shutdowns. The directory cannot be opened or manually deleted, so how can we get rid of this?

When you try to open the directory you'll get the following error:

It makes sense to get this error, because DFS make a sort of junction point on your fileserver to relocate you to the real point. When you try to delete the folder you'll get this error:

When a DFS link gets created, a reparsepoint is created in the DFSroots directory. This is a link to the original directory. Also, see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365503(VS.85).aspx for more information.

This reparsepoint is also what's causing the error. Normally, if you try to open a reparsepoint (like AppData in Windows 7 is), you'll get redirected to the original directory. In the case of DFS this works somewhat different, because the original directory isn't located on the same server.

To fix this we have to take some steps. First, open up Command Prompt and browse to your DFSroots directory. In my case this is C:\DFSroots. Open up your DFS namespace and look at the folder contents. This folder is what's being published when an user accesses your DFS namespace.

Above are the folder contents of the DFSroots folder in my test environment. Top Secret is a stale folder, so I'd like to delete this. Windows contains a tool called fsutil that can help us reach this goal. Type: fsutil reparsepoint query \\. In my case this would be fsutil reparsepoint query "C:\DFSroots\Public\Top Secret". Remember to enclose your query with quotes ("") when your name contains spaces.

The result should look alot like the following:

As you can see within the Tag Value, this reparsepoint is created by/for Microsoft DFS. Now, we're gonna delete this reparsepoint so our view of the namespace will be nice and clean again. Type: fsutil reparsepoint delete \\ and press Enter. Again, mind the quotes.

In this case the rule is: No result is good result. When you get a blank line your command succeeded. When you try to remove something that's not a reparse point you'll get an error looking a lot like the following one:

This means the reparse point is already deleted or you're giving in the wrong directory in your command line.

Hope this helps in keeping your DFS environment clean and tidy.

Regards,

Stefan Hazenbroek