Share via

Resolving Sysvol and GPO replication problems in Windows Server 2012

  • Article

GPO Replication and Sysvol Synchronization is often a source of problems in Active Directory Environment, specially with multiple Domain Controllers. I had a troubles keeping this synchronization synchronized, getting DFSReplication error on some Domain Controllers. I have 4 Domain Controllers which replicates one to another. Every 2 week I had to rebuild the whole synchronization.

There was no useful event informations, and these tools had no effect (saying to me that everything is OK) :

  • dfsrdiag

  • dcdiag

The only thing that was saying to me that some replication problems has occurred, was in the GPO Management Console, displaying me in the synchronization tab that sysvol was unreachable when i clicked "detect now"

No DNS problem, no configuration problems, I had test everything.

I finally found the solution in far away Microsoft Documentation.

 A far far away Microsoft Documentation part, talking about DFSReplication.

Finally, I had to modify a registry key, which enable the auto re-synchronization of the whole DFS database. Change the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\DFSR\Parameters\StopReplicationOnAutoRecovery registry key to a DWORD value of 0 (or delete it).

When it is set to 1, whenever the server experiences an invalid shutdown, DFS replication just stops. No brightly coloured message to tell you this, no message in ADDS, it just stops. Very helpful. Apparently, the reason they’ve done this is to stop files from being lost on downstream servers when upstream servers experience a power loss or whatever.

Hope this have been informative for you