SiteNotes

SiteNotes

Don't create additional sites unless you need them, since they may result in inefficient use of network bandwidth or poor performance of domain controller logon and replication functions.

Every site must have at least one site link for each site it is connected to; otherwise , domain controllers in the site will never replicate with those in the other connected sites.

If you schedule your site links to replicate only once a day (say at 3 a.m.), then replication latency may be unacceptably high in environments in which frequent changes are made to user and group settings. Using a more aggressive schedule (once an hour ) is recommended in most cases.

If you have both a high-speed backbone link, such as a T3 link, and a slow redundant backup link, such as a 56-Kbps link, between two sites, you might configure a cost value of 1 for the backbone link and 100 for the redundant link. That way, the redundant link will never be used unless the high-speed backbone link is down.

Multihomed computers can belong only to a single site.

When SMTP is used as the transport for site links, the replication schedule is ignored.

SMTP used as a replication transport consumes about twice the network bandwidth as RPCs over IP because updates need to be packaged in SMTP messages.

SMTP can be used to replicate schema, configuration, and global catalog information between sites, but it can't be used to replicate between domain controllers belonging to the same domain. If you use SMTP as your transport, then your sites should be separate domains.

To delegate control of sites, right-click on a site Delegate Control. See Delegation earlier in this chapter for more information.

A site link must contain at least two sites.

If you have two or more site links configured as a site-link bridge, the cost of the bridge is calculated as the sum of the costs of the links within the bridge.

You can delegate authority over sites, subnets, and Inter-Site Transports (see Delegation earlier in this chapter). You can apply Group Policy to sites as well (see Group Policy earlier in this chapter).

Manually created Active Directory connections will not be affected when Check Replication Topology is used to optimize intersite communications.

You can't use SMTP as an intersite transport unless you have installed a certificate authority (CA) in your enterprise and certificates on your domain controllers. This is necessary to ensure the authenticity of SMTP replication messages as they may be sent over the unsecured Internet.

See Also