DFS notes

There are a few notes I want to make about managing DFS - since it's really the main reason our offices are using servers, you can imagine I like all the tools I can get to keep an eye on it. Fortunately, these have greatly increased since Server 2003!

First, the Replication Diagnostic Health Reports are incredibly useful - dare I say more useful (and a lot easier) than wading through the event logs for the File services (which are, as I'm doing the initial replications, creating upwards of 20,000 events every 24 hours...even with filters, this is a daunting volume to try and make sure you haven't missed anything).

To create one, expand Roles, File Services, DFS Management and Replication in turn in the Server Manager window. You should see a list of all your replication groups, so right-click whichever one you want to create a report on and choose, "Create Diagnostic Report". The wizard will ask you for the type of report you want to create; in this case we want to create a "Health Report". In the next screen, choose where to save the report and if you want to rename it. In the next screen, make sure the servers you want to check are included and click Next. Then choose if you want to include backlogged files and count file sizes for each member (I do both and it's pretty quick, even on shares of 100+ GB). Once the report is generated, it will open up in Internet Explorer automatically. If the bottom of the report says, "Report loading, please wait", you need to disable the enhanced security for Administrators in Internet Explorer (Server Manager for your local server -> Configure IE ESC), then reload the report.

There's a pretty good amount of information in the reports, but it surfaces the most important stuff right in the section headings - primarily in the ERRORS and WARNINGS sections. Items listed here don't necessarily correspond directly to warnings or errors in the event log - they're things you really do care about. If a server is still getting the initial replication, that will show up as a WARNING on that server. Mostly, this is the information I was looking for, so that was nice and easy! Drill through the rest of the info for lots more information - I was interested to see that RDC allwed me to save, on average, between 85% and 95% of the bandwidth for replication...a HUGE improvement over my poor old Server 2003 days!

There was one other event I found on one of our reports that I need to mention here though: an error that One or more replicated folders have content skipped by DFS Replication.

Well, I didn't like that message at all, so I was happy to find out the reports give great details. In my case, it listed all the "Files that cannot be replicated under the replicated folder", under the heading that tells me they're not replicating because they're either temporary or symbolic links.

Running attrib.exe on the files listed didn't show me anything, so I found this excellent article that told me what tool to use in order to see if the files in question were, in fact, flagged as temporary.

They were.

I have no idea why AutoCAD marked them as temporary, but nobody who has ever had to manage AutoCAD installs will be surprised that it's AutoCAD's fault.

It's a bit harder to clear the temporary flag on the files, but the article nicely provided a PowerShell command that will remove the temporary flag on all files in a directory, in this case d:\data:

Get-childitem D:\Data -recurse | ForEach-Object -process {if (($_.attributes -band 0x100) -eq 0x100) {$_.attributes = ($_.attributes -band 0xFEFF)}}


Not bad!

Scheduling Replication Health Reports - Now that all my errors should be clear, I thought it would be beneficial, especially in the first few weeks of using the new servers, to get a fresh report every morning to check for replication issues. But even though we've only got 8 replicated folders under our DFS root, it's still a bit of a pain to create the report for each replication group manually. Fortunately, I found a TechNet Article onto which someone had appended a useful link and bit of code - it's the actual command you can use to create a report; in this case, from a batch file.

So I created a batch file with eight lines, each resembling the following:

dfsradmin health new /RgName:domain.tld\root\data /refmemname:domain\server /repname:c:\dfsreports\data.html /fscount:true

where "root" is the shared folder used by the DFS root and "data" is the replicated directory (I just named the report the same thing as the replicated directory). Set that up as a scheduled task to run daily, and I'm all set!