Ondrej Žilinec – IT Blog

Problem

I had one problem with DFSR. I had two servers. Server01 in located in Location01 and Server02 located in Location02. There is DFSR Replication Group configured between those two servers. Replication worked in one direction – from Server01 to Server02, but it didn’t work from Server02 to Server01.

Findings

When I looked into backlog of Server02 using command:

dfsrdiag backlog /rgname:Rep_Group /rfname:Rep_Folder /SendingMember:SERVER02 /Receivingmember:SERVER01

I found out that there is lots of files stuck in queue – backlog. All of them were called Thumbs.db. These files are used by Windows Explorer to store thumbnails of files in directories.

Solution

I fixed issue by clearing conflict directory using following commands. I had to find out GUID for my replication folder:

wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrreplicatedfolderconfig get replicatedfolderguid,replicatedfoldername

And then run procedure to clear conflict directory:

wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrreplicatedfolderinfo where “replicatedfolderguid=’GUID’” call cleanupconflictdirectory

After directory clearance replication stared to work.

But I wanted to prohibit to create Thumbs.db files on network shares. I don’t know about any setting that would disable it on client machines so I had to restrict creation on servers. I decided to create File Screen to prohibit Thumbs.db creation on servers.

1. On server go to Server Manager — Roles — File Services — Share and Storage Management — File Server Resource Manager — File Screening Management:

2. Right-click on File Groups and create new File Group:

– Name it

– Include file “Thumbs.db” into list

3. Right-click on File Screen Templates and create new screen template:

– Name it

– Make sure you have selected Active screening

– Select new created group “Thumbs.db”

4. Enable file screening on directory. Right-click on File Screens and create file screen.

– Select Path where File Screen should apply

– Select new created File Screen Template

And screen file is sucessfully set.

One more step I took was delete all Thumbs.db files from server’s disk. I run following powershell command in share directory:

Get-ChildItem -Force -Recurse | where { $_.Name -like “Thumbs.db”  } | Remove-Item -Force

And that’s all for today play with DFSR.

Today I was solving issue with not replicating DFSR server in Full Mesh topology. Here are couple helpful commands to work with DFSR:

To look if any replication is in progress:

dfsrdiag replicationstate

To look if there is anything in backlog:

dfsrdiag backlog /rgname:Rep_Group /rfname:Rep_Folder /SendingMember:SERVER01 /Receivingmember:SERVER02

To disable debug logging:

wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrmachineconfig set enabledebuglog=false

To set maximum debug files:

wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrmachineconfig set maxdebuglogfiles=2000

To set maximum lines in one log file:

wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrmachineconfig set maxdebuglogmessages=400000

To look for replication folder GUID:

wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrreplicatedfolderconfig get replicatedfolderguid,replicatedfoldername

To clean up conflict directory:

wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path dfsrreplicatedfolderinfo where “replicatedfolderguid=’GUID'” call cleanupconflictdirectory

That’s all folks for today,