How a client chooses a Distribution Point

Lately I get and see a lot of situations like this…

Question: I created an extra Distribution Point (DP) on a remote location, but the clients on the remote location are still connecting to the standard DP. Why are these clients not connecting to their local DP?
Answer:
When there are more DP’s in the same site and/or boundary, by default, the client will first connect to the DP with BITS enabled and not the closest one. If you want the clients to connect to their local DP, you have to make the DP protected.

…So I thought it might be handy to write in a few short steps how this process works.

Step From Action
1 Client Sends a content location request to its Management Point (MP)
2 MP The search for Distribution Points (DP’s), with the content, starts in the client’s current site. This can be the client’s assigned site, secondary site attached to it, or a site to which the client is roamed. When the content is not available here the search goes to the assigned site.
3 MP The list of found DP’s will be sorted. When a protected DP is found, where the client’s boundary is included, only this will be returned. If there is not a protected DP found it will return a list of non-protected DP’s that host the content.
4 MP The remaining DP’s on the list will be marked as local, or remote depending on the boundary that you have connected to it.
5 MP The list with available DP’s is send back to the client.
6 Client Tries to connect to the DP’s (of the list) in the following order, first for the local DP’s and then for the remote DP’s: Same IP subnet, Same AD site, remaining. In every category the client prefers DP’s with BITS enabled.

Then where does it go wrong?? Well, often the assumption is that the client searches for the DP’s by itself. But instead you have to tell your MP which boundaries you have and connect them to your DP’s by protecting them.

For extra information: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb632366.aspx

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