Modifying the Behavior of Inter-Site Replication

There are situations for many Active Directory administrators who want to be able to replicate changes between Active Directory sites almost instantly but are frustrated because of the minimum limit of 15 minutes set on their IP Site Links. If bandwidth is not an issue between the AD Sites, you can bypass the 15-minute minimum requirement by modifying the “options” attribute on the site link.

There are several options you can set, but if you are just interested in configuring your inter-site replication to behave like your intra-site replication, then set the attribute to 0x1 (USE_NOTIFY). Please note that this option does affect replication traffic frequency between sites. To enable change notification between sites:

Using the AD Sites and Services Console

1. Start the Active Directory Sites and Services MMC console.
2. Expand the Sites container.
3. Expand the Inter-site Transports container.
4. Click on the IP container.
5. Click on the Site Link you wish to modify, right click Properties.
6. Click on the Attribute Editor tab.
7. Click on the attribute called Options.
8. Change the value accordingly (set by default). See the list of options below.

Using the ADSI Edit Console

1. In ADSI Edit, connect to the Configuration Naming Context.
2. Expand Sites.
3. Expand Inter-Site Transports.
4. Select CN=IP.
5. Right-click the site link object, click Properties.
6. Click on the Options attribute.
7. Change the value accordingly (set by default). See the list of options below.

Options for Change Notification (the options can be combined):

0x1 USE_NOTIFY
0x2 TWOWAY_SYNC
0x3 USE_NOTIFY | TWOWAY_SYNC
0x4 DISABLE_COMPRESSION
0x5 USE_NOTIFY | DISABLE_COMPRESSION
0x6 TWOWAY_SYNC | DISABLE_COMPRESSION
0x7 USE_NOTIFY | TWOWAY_SYNC | DISABLE_COMPRESSION

USE_NOTIFY

Setting the Options attribute to 1 will enable change notification (USE_NOTIFY). The “Options” attribute is set to a (0x1) to enable change notification which will bypass the Site boundaries replication schedule and frequency for inter-site replication.

TWOWAY_SYNC

This option forces a sync in the opposite direction at end of the sync. This option is rarely used but may be useful when connecting sites that use demand-dial routing.

DISABLE_COMPRESSION

This option disables compression between Sites. Busy bridgehead domain controllers with high CPU utilization could benefit from disabling compression.