Hi All,

While working on the Schema upgrade I disable the outbound replication on Windows 2003/2008 Active Directory Domain Controller and when doing the schema upgrade. Once its finished successfully and I am sure all is ok on the DC, I enable the replication.

Here is the command to disable Outbound Replication for Domain Controllers.

repadmin /options localhost +disable_otbound_repl

To enable replication again:

repadmin /options localhost -disable_otbound_repl

Here is the command to disable Inbound Replication for Domain Controllers.

repadmin /options localhost +disable_inbound_repl

To enable replication again:

repadmin /options localhost -disable_inbound_repl

Hi All

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Hi All,

we seems to have become a magnet for bugchecks (bluescreens) and my group is getting hit with them from all angles. We had been having a bunch of blue screens (stop 0xC4) on a perticular server and all of testing and debugging got us no where.

So we ran verifier to check for all drivers on this server. As soon as we finished configuring verifier.exe and gave the server a reboot it blue screened with a STOP 0x000000D5, but this time the culprit came out. It was cdprobe.sys running on this windows 2003 server as part of Symantec's Centennial Discovery Client Agent. We disabled it and the server has been running fine since then.

So how do you use Verifier.exe ???

Here are the steps to enable Verifier.

Start > Run, type Verifier and hit enter.

Select the radio button for Create custom settings (for code developers), click Next

on this screen click Select individual settings from a full list, click Next

Tick the first three check boxes of Special Pool, Pool Tracking, Force IRQL checking, click Next

Check the box for Select driver names for a list and click Next

In this screen, sort by Provider and then select all the Non-Microsoft drivers. Click Finish. It will ask you to reboot.

If your server has a bad driver it will bluescreen and display the name of the problematic driver (see screenshot below).

This morning got a new DFS built going and after getting all the config work on it, tried to get the Folder replication to start but got this rude error.

Domain: The Active Directory schema on domain controller dc1 cannot be read. This error might me caused by schema that has not been extended, or was extended improperly. A class schema object cannot be found.



So went into event viewer to check the error in DFS replication and found this:


It was followed by this:

Event ID: 6012

Description:The DFS Replication service detected an incompatible Active Directory schema version while trying to read configuration objects from server DC1. The service disconnected from this server and will try again in the next polling cycle.

Additional Information:

Expected Version: 31

Incompatible Server Version: 30

Looked up Event ID 6012 and found this article by Microsoft. Going through the article cleared everything.

Our Domain Controllers were running Windows 2003 while our file servers had moved up to Windows 2003 R2. So the solution was simple, backup your domain controller, get the CD 2 of the Windows 2003 R2 and run adprep.exe /forestprep from it. We did that and voila DFS replication working happily.

Event Type: Information

Event Source: DFSREvent

Event ID: 1206

Description:The DFS Replication service successfully contacted domain controller \\DC1 to access configuration information.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Back from my holiday and straight into couple of big migration projects. While running these projects I needed to move 20TB of data around.

Now I have generally used Robocopy for pretty much all my copy/move/sync needs but to move that much of data I needed another utility that could do it faster. Comes in Microsoft with their RichCopy, which was an internal tool for many years till they made it public.

The advantage of Richcopy is that its multithreaded. Really multithreaded. I ran 256 directory copy threads with eachdirectory copy getting 256 file copy operations, effectively running 65536 copy operations simultaniously and Richcopy ran with it just fine. Check out the screehshots below.


You can grab your copy from here.