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Matt
Asked: 2016-06-01 04:14:36 +0800 CST

Why is my PolicyDefintions folder being renamed?

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I was trying to update our Central Store with new policies for Windows 10. Originally I made a copy of the store in the same location and named it .bak just in case.

I copied the local definitions folder into the Store successfully. However I look now and see the folder names:

PolicyDefinitions_NTFRS_45859c8a
PolicyDefinitions_NTFRS_49198af0

No surprise that when I rename one of them to drop the new suffix it is tacked on again pretty quickly. I am making these changes on one of the domain controllers. We have 4 AD sites and 6 DC's in total.

So this is related to FRS but I don't see errors related to this in the logs. I am not sure what the issue is here. Replication still appears to be working as the new names are seen on all my other DC's. Group Policy however is not pulling templates from the Central Store; just my local computer.

group-policy windows-server-2008-r2

2 Answers

  1. I think that You've created a FRS conflict by having multiple folders of the same name in replicated locations, as described in MS KB 328492

    SYMPTOMS File Replication service (FRS) may change the name of a folder by adding "NTFRS_xxxxxxxx" to the folder name.

    Note In this example, xxxxxxxx represents eight random hexadecimal digits.

    The following is an example of two frequently changed folders:

    07/29/2002 09:58a Policies 07/29/2002 09:58a Policies_NTFRS_000add30 07/29/2002 10:18a scripts 07/29/2002 10:02p scripts_NTFRS_000874bb

    CAUSE When two users create a folder of the same name on two different replicas, File Replication service (FRS) detects a name conflict during replication.

    One of the create operations take precedence and that folder retains the name. The other folder name is changed.

    I'm guessing that this occurred when you ?renamed your policy definitions folder and then ?added another policy definitions folder. I would advise removing all the policy definitions folders for a few days and letting replication clear them out of all DCs and then re-add the central store policy definitions folder.

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  2. Not this specific problem but I had read that there could be issues that arise from AD forests that were upgraded from 2003 to 2008. That was the case for mine. The solution I followed was to migrate the SYSVOL sharing responsibility from File Replication Services(FRS) to DFSR. In order for this to work your domain functional level needs to be at least 2008

    Full instructions are available on TechNet for the migration procedure. The caveats and details might be too long for this format as there are many angles to have to consider. In its simplest from you are running the dfsrmig utility on the PDC emulator.

    Progressively raise the GlobalState from Start, Prepared, Replicated to Eliminated. Verifying that the sysvol share is available and that data is being copied to the new share location during these steps (in my case a folder called sysvol_dfsr in the windows directory.) Only change the GlobalState to the next level once the current state is the same for all DC's.

    You can use dfsrmig /GetMigrationState to verify the current level so as to know when you can comfortable proceed.

    Once your reach the GlobalState Redirected (By running dfsrmig /SetGlobalState 2 and confirming) DFSR should now be hosting an replicating the sysvol shares. Confirm and test replication.

    You can roll the whole process back still at this state by changing the Global State back. If you are confident that everything is working the final step would be then to remove the old FRS setup. Changing the GlobalState to Eliminated would finalize that: dfsrmig /SetGlobalState 3.

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