[Aside] How to convert a manually added AD site connection to an automatically generated one

Cool tip via a Microsoft blog post. If you have a connection object in your AD Sites and Services that was manually created and you now want to switch over to letting KCC generate the connection objects instead of using the manual one, the easiest thing to do is convert the manually created one to an automatic one using ADSI Edit.

1.) Open ADSI Edit and go to the Configuration partition.

2.) Drill down to Sites, the site where the manual connection object is, Servers, the server where the manual connection object is created, NTDS Settings

3.) Right click on the manual connection object and go to properties

4.) Go to the Options attribute and change it from 0 to 1 (if it’s an RODC, then change it from 64 to 65)

5.) Either wait 15 minutes (that’s how often the KCC runs) or run repadmin /kcc to manually kick it off

While on that topic, here’s a blog post to enable change notifications on manually created connections. More values for the options attribute in this spec document.

Also, a link to myself on the TechNet AD Replication topology section of Bridge All Site Links (BASL). Our environment now has a few sites that can’t route to all the other sites so I had to disable BASL today and was reading up on it.