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I have an infrastructure where a shared folder in a Windows server is needed, and every Windows clients take from there some files. The infrastructure is too big and we encounter the "slow connection" error many time. Clients sometimes cannot reach the server, or the folder is not sync for months.

Now we have one server and many clients who point at it, we would like to add an intermediate level and obtain the following solution: Main server - 5 server ho read from the main - clients who connect to the secondary layer.

Is it possible to do with Windows features only?

Thanks!

Possa
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    It sounds like you are looking to setup something similar to DFS with DFS replication across multiple servers. But, honestly, I'm not really sure what you're trying to accomplish. We could step back and take a look at what is causing the "slow connection" error depending on the links between the clients and the servers, the file server configuration (disk/network/CPU/memory). If we diagnose the problem first, it would help in generating a proper solution. If clients not reaching the server, just adding more servers might not fix the issue. – Rex Dec 19 '13 at 16:12
  • The extension of the network, and the geolocality of the clients are the problems. The files are just a dozen and are very small. DFS is probably too much. – Possa Dec 19 '13 at 16:16

2 Answers2

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It sounds like you're looking for BranchCache in "distributed cache mode", to me. In this mode, BranchCache allows clients in a remote subnet to share cached copies of files, in a peer-to-peer fashion, over their local LAN.

Of course, you'll need to satisfy the server and client OS requirements in order to take advantage of the feature, but it sounds like its right up the alley of what you want.

Evan Anderson
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I worked a company that suffered from this same issue with slow geo sites and below are some of the things we did to help with this issue.

From the sounds of your statement you are already using offline files that is designed to do this function. If the link it to slow to sync everyone to this share. You are going to have to get the files local some how so they can bypass the slow WAN and do work from the LAN only.

I think the only way to fix this issue is below, if you can't get the link to the GEO site upgraded.

  1. network cache appliance
  2. DFS (Windows)
  3. Adding a new windows server (or dedicated workstation but I would only recommend this for a small environment) at the GEO site that is slow, and sync data to that server. then have the users pull it from the local server. If you are going to do this might as well do DFS or put DFS on top of this setup. (All Windows based)
SpiderIce
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