Stalling FRS...

[Scott]

I have two 2003 AD servers ("AD1" and "AD2") and I'm having a strange
problem with DFS/FRS. Both systems are identical hardware and 2003 loads.
Each system has a GigE NIC and they are in the same domain
("mycompany.net").



Each system has 400 GB of data on identical disk drive configs. On AD1 the
NIC properties are all default except the primary DNS is set to 127.0.0.1
and secondary is set to the IP address of AD2. On AD2 the secondary is set
tot the IP address of AD1.



The IP and gateway settings for both are set to come from my DHCP router but
both IP/Mac addresses are locked-in on the router and will never change.



DFS and FRS was set-up on AD1 and AD1 is the operations manager for
everything.



Most of the 400GB was manually copied to AD2. However, there is a directory
(a DFS root) that I want to replicate from AD1 to AD2 using only FRS. To
start with, the directory exists on both AD1 and AD2 in the same location.
AD1 holds the data (38 GB) and this dir on AD2 is empty. FRS seems to run
fine and then suddenly stops after replicating only 7-20 GB of the data.



I get some errors/warnings:



- The staging area is full. I expanded the staging area on both AD1 and AD2
from 675MB to 4GB and these errors slowed to only one (instead of 5-6
before)



- FRS warning: "The FRS is having trouble enabling replication from AD1 to
AD2 for n:\dir using the DNS name AD1.mycompany.net. FRS will keep trying."



- DNS warning: "The zone mycompany.net was previously loaded from the
directory partition MicrosoftDNS but another copy of the zone has been found
in directory partition DomainDnsZones.mycompany.net. The DNS server will
ignore this new copy of the zone> Please resolve this conflict as soon as
possible."



I also get W32Time errors stating that the time provider NtpClient sources
are currently not accessible.



At this point AD2 is not available on the network at all and cannot be
reached via the net. Can anyone point me in the right direction to get this
environment stabilized?

Scott

 

[Scott]

Cary,
Thanks for the help. Let me add more info:

The directory giveing me trouble was empty on the target side before I
started so there would not have been any file conflict between the sides.
Although I'm not sure how FRS knew to replicate the 38GB of data from AD1 to
AD2 and not erase the 38 GB from AD1 instaed. That is, if the target root on
AD2 was empty, how did FRS know which target root held the correct data (AD1
with 38 GB or AD2 with nothing)? I just rebooted AD2 since it stopped at 19
GB with only the following errors:

AD2: FRS is having trouble enabling replication from AD1 to AD2. FRS will
keep trying.
AD2: DNS previously loaded zone error - same as below. But this one I got
just now when I rebooted AD2 - not when FRS stopped.

AD1: NTDS KCC: KCC has detected that successive attempts to replicate with
the following domain controller have failed. Attempts 2...Additional info
error 1722 RPC server is unavailable.

And, of course, AD2 cannot be contacted on the network at all.

It appears that, for some reason, AD2 just drops off the network. When I
reboot AD2 FRS starts-up aagain and all is fine. Since I only have two
servers I selected the ring topology for FRS, should I have used something
else?
Scott