A little background: I'm a programmer for a small company, and we have a lot of internal python tools that employees run. Our "deployment" process clones our git repo into a deployment folder at a unc path.
After that, we run pytest on it and build the python environment yada yada - and finally run a few powershell commands to:
- Add
\\pipelinetools\Code\deployments\deployment2as a target to our DFS path (let's sayZ:\pipeline\live) - Remove the old target
\\pipelinetools\Code\deployments\deployment1
This appeared to work when I was testing it, but now that we have the whole office using this system I've seen a few problems:
- python IO errors spike after the DFS target switch.
- python may say the script can not be found
- Non-python files can't load
These issues appear to only happen right after the switch, for maybe 10-15 minutes.
I hopped on one machine that had this issue, and tried to manually browse to Z:\pipeline\live, and all sorts of issues came up. In Explorer, I tried clicking around to different folders in our code base on the DFS path. Sometimes, I'd get directory not found errors, sometimes explorer would show an empty directory (that I know contains files), and sometimes SOME files would show up but not others. Other times, it would work totally fine for a moment and then break again.
The old target wasn't deleted - in this example, both original UNC paths still existed, and manually browsing to the UNC path instead of the letter drive/DFS folder would work fine. It appears to be an issue ONLY on the DFS file system, and only right after the target folder changes.
We've also checked on two different network drives by two different manufactures, and both seem to exhibit this issue.
It doesn't appear to be a global issue - just sporadically on different (windows 10) computers.
Is there anything about DFS that I'm missing? Is there expected downtime when switching targets?
