Stephen Mathews here; now tell me, do you have a domain controller you’re afraid to turn on? Maybe it lost power and nobody noticed for a couple months or you don’t trust your AD restore procedures; perhaps a troubled DC keeps deleting your DNS records – whatever happened, I’m going to show you how to power it on without allowing it to replicate.
The end goal is to disable replication on the troubled DC. This is done very simply by using the repadmin commands:
repadmin /options +DISABLE_INBOUND_REPL
repadmin /options +DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL
To disable replication on the troubled machine you must have either local or remote access. The local commands are above, to disable replication remotely use the same commands and add the server name. However, the server must be reachable via the network – the same network that replication runs over. You could try hammering the troubled DC with the commands during its startup and you may block replication before the DC starts, but let’s go with a more proactive method. We’ll block replication on its partners first.
The first step to finding the DC’s replication partners is to check the Connections tab inside NTDS Settings within Active Directory Sites and Services. In the below example my 2 “DFS” servers are indeed Domain Controllers, with SNY-DFS-VM02 is my troubled DC that needs replication blocked.
We have two connection fields: “Replicate From” and “Replicate To”; we also have two ways to block replication: Inbound and Outbound. We’re going to disable Outbound replication on the “Replicate From” servers and disable Inbound replication on the “Replicate To” servers. We can do this remotely using repadmin:
repadmin /options <Replicate From> +DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL
repadmin /options <Replicate To> +DISABLE_INBOUND_REPL
You can see this in the below screenshot that the “Current DSA Options” grow from 1 option “IS_GC” to 3 options “IS_GC DISABLE_INBOUND_REPL DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL”
Now that all the partners have their replication blocked, we can turn on the troubled DC and block its replication the same way. Once you’ve confirmed the troubled DC is blocked, go ahead and reverse your changes for the partners.
We’ll do one final check to verify the troubled DC is not replicating. Voila, it reports that “The destination server is currently rejecting replication requests.”
After walking you through the GUI, I’ll share with you how I did it with PowerShell. I use Get- ADReplicationConnection to check all the Replication Connections for any that match the troubled DC in the ReplicateFromDirectoryServer or ReplicateToDirectoryServer properties. Once I have those, I do some string parsing to pull out the server names. Then I write the repadmin command for both the source and target servers and store them in an array. After I get all the commands, I need to move the troubled DC repadmin commands to the end of the array (no easy way there, I ended up creating 3 arrays). Finally, I execute the commands with the output in the below screenshot. The script waits for the troubled DC to become reachable – this is when you turn on the troubled DC. Once it blocks the replication on the troubled DC, it reverses the changes on its replication partners.
$DCtoBlock = “sny-dfs-vm02″
$Commands = @()
Get-ADReplicationConnection -Filter * |
Where-Object {
($_.ReplicateFromDirectoryServer -match $DCtoBlock) -or
($_.ReplicateToDirectoryServer -match $DCtoBlock)
} |
ForEach-Object {
$Source = $_.ReplicateFromDirectoryServer.Split(‘,’)[1].Replace(‘CN=’,””)
$Target = $_.ReplicateToDirectoryServer.Split(‘,’)[0].Replace(‘CN=’,””)
$Commands += “repadmin /options $Source DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL
$Commands += “repadmin /options $Target DISABLE_INBOUND_REPL”
}
$Commands = $Commands | Select-Object -Unique | Sort-Object
$TailCmds = $Commands | Select-String -Pattern $DCtoBlock
$Commands = $Commands | Select-String -Pattern $DCtoBlock -NotMatch
$Commands += $TailCmds
foreach ($Action in @{‘+’=$true;’-‘=$null}.GetEnumerator()) {
foreach ($Command in $Commands) {
$Option = $Command.ToString().Split()[-1]
$CmdString = $Command.ToString().Replace($Option,”$($Action.Name)$Option”)
If (!(($CmdString -match $DCtoBlock) -and ($Action.Name -match ‘-‘))) {
do {
$CmdString
Invoke-Expression -Command $CmdString | Out-Null
$RepAdminOptions = Invoke-Expression -Command $Command.ToString().Replace($Option,””)
} while (($RepAdminOptions | Select-String -Pattern $Option -Quiet) -ne $Action.Value)
}
}
}
Thanks for reading and let’s keep those DCs on eh?