technical solutions and commentary

If you use Microsoft’s DFS (Distributed File System) in conjunction with Microsoft’s FRS (File Replication Service) to organized and distribute data through your organization you may have run into problems with data replica’s being up to date.

A company which I support experienced problems with their DFS/FRS configuration. They have a central location which houses the master file share for there company shared data (about 2 GB worth). They have a branch office which they use FRS to replicate this data to. This data is fairly static so it’s a good candidate for FRS. We discovered that shortly after the replicated to the remote server for the first time, data was not being kept up to date. In addition to comparing the file replica’s manually, we also used Ultrasound (a powerful tool from Microsoft that measures the functioning of FRS replica set) in monitoring the replication.

In troubleshooting this problem, we discovered that the FRS-staging area is set by default to 660 MB in Windows Server 2003 (Windows 2000 can experience this same problem). If you have more a lot more data than this in the share you are trying to replicate you will most likely need to increase the size of the staging area manually. This is done in the registry of the master server and replica server. Then the FRS services need to be started and the replication should work.

Microsoft has a couple of useful KB articles on how to do this:
• File Replication Service Stops Responding When Staging Area is Full (KB 264822)
• Configuring Correct Staging Area Space for Replica Sets (KB329491)