Force Domain Controller Replication





3.00/5 (2 votes)
Sep 24, 2003
1 min read

72361
Force Replication in a Windows AD enterprise network.
Introduction
One of the problems in a W2000 Enterprise environment is that replication of Active Directory information can take a while (according to the site information). This is specially a problem during unattended installs. The problem is that this is not really easily available in W2000. Many administrators miss this functionality when migrating from NT4 to 2000. There is a tool in W2000 which allows to replicate one domain controller with another one, but using this with many ADs is not very handy. You would have to maintain a batch file with a line per DC. The tool to replicate DC information is repadmin.
Solution
To solve this problem I made this simple VB Script. It simply reads all the DCs from AD using LDAP and fires the replication tools in separate command boxes, this makes it also multi-treaded ;-)
Copy the following text in a VBS file and alter the following things:
MyMainDC
-> Main Domain Controller Namemydomain.com
-> Your domaindc=mydomain,dc=com
-> Your domain
The MyMainDC
is to avoid the Main Domain Controller to synchronize with itself.
Run this script file any time you want to replicate the whole domain.
For me, this was enough to overcome my problems. Another option would be to take the site information in consideration. Because this is not done here, it could be that you have to run this script twice. Maybe I will change that one day.
'***********************************************
'
' Replicate.vbs
' (c) 2003, Computech, Author: Peter Verijke
'
'***********************************************
Option Explicit
Dim objDSE, strDN, objContainer, objChild, sCommand, WshShell
Set objDSE = GetObject("LDAP://rootDSE")
strDN = "OU=Domain Controllers," & objDSE.Get("defaultNamingContext")
Set objContainer = GetObject("LDAP://" & strDN)
sCommand = "%COMSPEC% /C "
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
objContainer.Filter = Array("Computer")
For Each objChild In objContainer
if Ucase(mid(objChild.Name,4)) <> "MyMainDC" then
WshShell.Run(sCommand & "if exist \\" & _
mid(objChild.Name,4) & "\Sysvol repadmin /syncall " _
& mid(objChild.Name,4) & _
".mydomain.com dc=mydomain,dc=com /force")
end if
Next