FRS or DFSR not replicating certain files

I had an issue today where a file that I had added to the SYSVOL share on my network, hadn’t been replicated to other domain controllers. The file was a jpeg that had been created by our designer, which needed to be pushed out to client computers using group policy preferences. I modified the GPO last week, but noticed this morning that the file wasn’t being to copied to all client computers. I had a look at the location where I had created the file in the SYSVOL share on various domain controllers, and found that the file hadn’t been replicated to any of them. In fact, it was only present on the server that I had originally copied it to.

I checked the logs on a few of the domain contollers for errors with the File Replication Service, but there were none. Next I created a test text file in the SYSVOL share to see if it replicated to other domain controllers and it replicated straight away. On further investigation I discovered that the temp attribute had been set on the jpeg file for some reason when it was created, and therefore it was being ignored for the purposes of replication by FRS, which is the standard behaviour, and also applies to DFSR.

You can’t view the temp or ‘T’ attribute using the attrib command, so a grabbed a utility called BulkFileChanger which verified this and allowed also allowed me to quickly remove the temp attribute. I then recopied the file to the SYSVOL share and it replicated to the other servers as normal.

Alternatively, you could use fsutil to discover the current attributes set on the file or files, and then use powershell to reset the attributes as outlined in the technet article below.    

References:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/dfsr-does-not-replicate-temporary-files.aspx