Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

As soon as you have multiple windows servers, or even multiple sites, you will use replication to ensure having the same data available locally and redundant.

However, the tools for checking successful replication are not always obvious, or even integrated into the rest of the system.

For Active Directory, the tool is called repadmin. This tool is part of the Support Tools, located on the Windows Server 2003 CD (or CD1, for R2) in \SUPPORT\TOOLS\SUPTOOLS.MSI.

repadmin can do a lot – the official documentation can tell you much more than i.

The one option of repadmin i use most often is /showrepl. It shows you the last time a DC has synced to other DCs, and if errors occured what they were.

For DFS-R, there are multiple ways available. The dfsmgmt.msc console offers a graphic view of the replication status in a nice and executive friendly report. But you can also use the dfsrdiag commandline tool to query specific DFS information parameters.