In addition to my previous post on reestablishing synchronization of SYSVOL folders between DCs, I received some comments that going true steps in the posts is not possible to reestablish sync. After this I diagnosed some situations when friends allowed me to connect and there was always a similar situation: DFS replication stops to work after dirty shutdown (event 2212 and 2213) and nobody saw it for a long time – more than 60 days. This will cause an Error 4012 where you can see that the server was “disconnected” for a time, which is longer than the time allowed by the MaxOfflineTimeInDays parameter (60 days by default).
To verify how long are DCs not synced, use this command line (execute from elevated command prompt):
For /f %i IN (‘dsquery server -o rdn’) do @echo %i && @wmic /node:”%i” /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path DfsrMachineConfig get MaxOfflineTimeInDays
If the result is more than 60 days, you have to extend MaxOfflineTimeInDays parameter on all servers where you have DFS replication in error (State = 5) and where MaxOfflineTimeInDays parameter is greater than 60. Use this command line on any DCs that are in error:
wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path DfsrMachineConfig set MaxOfflineTimeInDays=365
Of course you can replace the number 365 with any number you want, but it has to be greater than the displayed MaxOfflineTimeInDays value.
Wait for few minutes and resume replication as is described in the previous post. It should work.
I suggest also to put back the value MaxOfflineTimeInDays parameter to previous value:
wmic /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path DfsrMachineConfig set MaxOfflineTimeInDays=60
