magic

Charles10/4/2008 8:43:19 AM

I found Tony Redmond’s “Exchange Directory Replication” (November 1998) interesting and informative. The author states that for intersite Directory replication to occur, you can use a site connector, X.400 connector, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connector between the sites you want to share Directory information.
My Exchange organization (running Exchange Server 5.0 on Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3—–SP3) has two sites linked by a Dynamic Remote Access Service (DRAS) connector. Each site has about 50 users, and the DRAS connector uses a 14.4Kbps modem connected to analog telephone lines on both ends. After the initial setup of the DRAS connector, I created and configured a directory replication connector between the two sites. The exchange of Directory information and interpersonal communications through the connector was satisfactory.
However, I find that even after I change the Directory replication schedule to Never on both sites, messages from the Directory Service (DS) continue to clutter the Message Transfer Agent (MTA) queue—–so much so that I have to manually delete these messages from the queue before initiating a DRAS connection to allow transfer of crucial interpersonal messages across the slow, unreliable link. Restarting the Exchange services or rebooting the servers doesn’t help. Can you shed some light on why such behavior occurs?

--Shailendra Shenoy




You can use the DRAS connector for Directory replication messages because they are just like any other messages that you can transfer across any connector. However, modem speed will always limit the capacity of the DRAS connector, and transferring the replication traffic that any reasonably sized Directory (or one that changes frequently) generates will place a lot of strain on the connector. You’ve given interpersonal mail some priority by deleting Directory messages off the queue, but the DS will re-create these messages later when it recognizes that some holes exist in the Directory on either side of the link. The only way to restrict the amount of traffic on a directory replication connector is to tune the schedule to a point at which you can live with the amount of traffic the connector produces while keeping the Directory in sync.

--Tony Redmond

Shailendra Shenoy 8/6/1999 1:40:30 PM