Yes. Enabling inter-site change notifications essentially means that you have intra-site replication occuring over a site link. The only real difference is that bridgeheads are still used.
Basically, when a DC receives a change, a notification is generated and sent to it's downstream partners. By default, notifications are only sent to adjacent DCs within the same site. When you enable change notifications on a site link, notifications are forwarded over the site link by the local bridgeheads. This means that any change will have replicated from the local bridgehead to the remote bridghead within ~30 seconds. So, a change should have propogated across the site in question in under a minute. Obviously, this puts a little extra load on the BHs, and more frequent amounts of traffic on the cross-site links. If the links are more the 2Mbps and the BHs aren't dying under the load, it will be OK to enable this, but you should monitor the usual CPU and disk queues to be sure. If the BHs are really old, or you have slow lines then you might want to do additional testing and/ or reconsider. --Paul ----- Original Message ----- From: Anders Blomgren To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 1:11 AM Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] do I have to choose between intra-site replication speeds or dc based on site? Does change notification add anything else than account lockouts to the table? I was hoping for some way to add the whole shebang or atleast something that encompasses most daily administrative tasks. Regards, Anders On 1/4/07, Roger Longden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: You can enable change notification on the site links between the sites in question to allow them to replicate as if they are in the same site. This has the nice benefit in that you can have separate sites for authentication, SMS, Exchange etc purposes while allowing the DCs to replicate (AD replication only; FRS replication is not impacted) in a more timely manner. The link below contains some instructions on enabling the option. Briefly, you modify the "options" attribute on the site link. Specifically for change notification it's as simple as adding "1" to whatever the current value is. It's "<not set>" by default. The change is dynamic; just wait for replication of the change and the KCC to run on both ends. Especially for environments like what you seem to be describing change notification between sites is a common configuration. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/technologies/activedirectory/maintain/opsguide/part2/adogdapb.mspx#EY6AI - Roger From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Anders Blomgren Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2007 6:22 PM To: ActiveDir@mail.activedir.org Subject: [ActiveDir] do I have to choose between intra-site replication speeds or dc based on site? Hi, We have several different locations, all very well connected (min 100Mbit). Each location has a dc. Right now, each location is it's own site so that the users connect to their local dc. This has the (in my case) disadvantage of limiting the replication schedule to a minimum of 15 minutes. Our network would have no difficulty handling intra-site replication but is there a way to make sure users connect to their geographically closest dc, including dfs? Yes, I want to have my cake and eat it. But can it be done? Regards, Anders