fix a journal wrap without a restore?

[james]

Hi
We've just built a second DC for our domain, but it's not replicating.
Looking into it, the existing DC is in a journal wrap state.

Looking on technet etc., it seems we might need to perform a
non-authoritative restore. Trouble is, these errors have been coming up for
a couple of years (everything still worked, so we didn't think much of it!)
so we don't have a backup from prior to that to restore.
The articles say it will sort itself from an inbound partner, but as the
other DC hasn't ever replicated I don't think this will work.
How else can we get around it?
James.

 

[Harj]

Hi,

I have dealt with over 50 cases with journal wrap and 90 percent of
them are resolved preforming a D2 on the DC in journal wrap. Question
is, why have just notice the errors after a few years? The event log
is GOD and should be checked on a regular basis so issues like this do
not occur. As you do not have a backup a D2 is recommended here as it
will grab everything from the other domain controller after you restart
ntfrs.
You should try to find out why this happened in the first place. Does
no good to get it up just for it to wrap on you again in the future.
Verify DNS is configured correctly, verify connectivity between domain
controllers...

Do you have DFS in the environment? If so be very careful as I have
seen where people have lost a lot of information after a D2.

Using the BurFlags registry key to reinitialize File Replication
Service replica sets
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290762


Good luck
Asset Management done right
www.specopssoft.com

 

[james]

Hi,

I have dealt with over 50 cases with journal wrap and 90 percent of
them are resolved preforming a D2 on the DC in journal wrap. Question
is, why have just notice the errors after a few years? The event log
is GOD and should be checked on a regular basis so issues like this do
not occur.

Indeed - all I can do is mutter things about management, distribution of
time, and being made to do customer support instead of looking after the
infrastructure...

As you do not have a backup a D2 is recommended here as it
will grab everything from the other domain controller after you restart
ntfrs.

Tried that, but I just ended up with both DC's saying they couldn't
replicate - I think this was because the second DC has never replicated
(it's new) so both were "empty"...
So I set the main DC to a D4 after copying the backed up files from the D2
stage, and set the (new) backup DC to a D2 and re-started the services and
it all now looks ok...

You should try to find out why this happened in the first place. Does
no good to get it up just for it to wrap on you again in the future.
Verify DNS is configured correctly, verify connectivity between domain
controllers...

DNS is ok - as I said, the wrap errors had been there for some time so not
sure why they occurred...

Do you have DFS in the environment? If so be very careful as I have
seen where people have lost a lot of information after a D2.

We don't use this at the moment, thankfully.

Using the BurFlags registry key to reinitialize File Replication
Service replica sets
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290762

Thanks for the help!
James.