SCAPaoT

Since DFS Namespaces are available in Windwos 2000, clients get the referrals to the linked shares with the netbios name instead of the FQDN of a fileserver.
In Server 2008 R2 nothing was changed. So clients get the referall with only the netbios-name of the server.

In time where Microsoft wants WINS to die, why don’t they change that?

Getting the netbios instead of the FQDN of a server doesn’t make any problems when all your systems work in just a single active directory domain.
But if you need to gain access from outside the domain where the dfsroot is in, then using only the netbiosname can make a problem.

Two possible solutions are:
1. Add the dns suffix to the suffix search list, so it will try accessing the netbios name with the dns suffix attached if the netbios name isn’t found.
This has to be done on every client. It can be done by GPO or DHCP to not to touch all clients)

2. This is the one I preferr:
At a Registy key to the server that will be the root server for the namespace.
If the server already is a namespace server. you have to remove the root before setting the key.
The value is DfsDnsConfig = 1 (dWord) under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dfs

All DFS-Namespaces have to be build up again. For that you can export the namespace with dfsutli, change all netbios names into FQDN’s and import it back.

Read this KB article also:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244380/en-us