Tech Talk

The following steps are useful to retrive the replication information from the AD

First install windows Support tools on your Domain Controller then,

To retrieve replication status


Open a command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

repadmin /showrepl * /csv >showrepl.csv

In Excel, on the File menu, click Open.

In Files of type, click Text Files (*.prn;*.txt;*.csv).

In Look in, navigate to showrepl.csv, and then click Open.

In the Excel spreadsheet, right-click the column heading for showrepl_COLUMNS (column A) and then click Hide. Repeat for the column labeled Transport Type.

Select the row just under the column headings, and then, on the Windows menu, click Freeze Pane.

Click the upper-left corner of the spreadsheet to highlight the entire spreadsheet. On the Data menu, point to Filter, and then click AutoFilter.

In the heading of the Last Success column, click the down arrow, and then click Sort Ascending.

In the heading of the Source DC column, click the down arrow, and then click Custom. In the Custom AutoFilter dialog box, complete the custom filter as follows:

Under Source DC, click does not contain.

In the corresponding text box, type del to filter deleted domain controllers from the spreadsheet.

In the heading of the Last Failure column, click the down arrow, and then click Custom. In the Custom AutoFilter dialog box, complete the custom filter as follows:

Under Last Failure, click does not equal.

In the corresponding text box, type 0 to filter for only domain controllers that are experiencing failures.

For every domain controller in the forest, the spreadsheet shows the source replication partner, the time that replication last occurred, and the time that the last replication failure occurred for each naming context (directory partition). By using Autofilter in Excel, you can view the replication health for working domain controllers only, failing domain controllers only, or domain controllers that are the least or most current, and you can see the replication partners that are replicating successfully.

Attempting to Resolve Problems
Replication problems are reported in event messages and in various error messages that occur when an application or service attempts an operation. Ideally, these messages are collected by your monitoring application or when you retrieve replication status.

Most replication problems are identified in the event messages that are logged in the Directory Service event log. Replication problems might also be identified in the form of error messages in the output of the repadmin /showrepl command.

repadmin /showrepl Error Messages That Indicate Replication Problems
To identify Active Directory replication problems, use the repadmin /showrepl command as described in the previous section. The following table shows error messages that are generated by this command, along with the root causes of the errors and links to topics that provide solutions for the errors.