Troubleshoot missing SYSVOL and Netlogon shares with a little backup from the experts at Bobcares.

At Bobcares, we offer solutions for every query, big and small, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Let’s take a look at how our Support Team is ready to help customers troubleshoot missing SYSVOL and Netlogon shares.

How to troubleshoot missing SYSVOL and Netlogon shares

According to our Support Techs, if SYSVOL and Netlogon shares are missing on the domain controller, we are likely to come across the following symptoms:

• An empty sysvol folder.
• A recent promotion of the problematic domain controller.
• The environment has domain controllers running earlier versions of Windows older than Windows Server 2012 R2.
• SYSVOL Share replicated folder is down with the help of DFS Replication.
• DFS Replication service of an upstream domain controller is currently in an error state.

After careful analysis, our Support Techs have come to the conclusion that domain controllers without SYSVOL shared are not able to replicate inbound due to upstream domain controllers in an error state.

Fortunately, our Support Team has come up with a solution that involves the following steps:

1. Evaluate the state of DFS Replication on all domain controllers
2. Prepare the domain controllers that are in an error state
3. Recover DFS Replication on the domain controllers in the error state

Step 1 – Evaluate the state of DFS Replication on all domain controllers

1. First, check for the SYSVOL share
2. Then, check the DFS Replication state
3. Next, looks in the event logs for recent errors or warnings
4. After that, check the Content Freshness configuration by looking at the MaxOfflineTimeInDays setting with the following command:

   wmic.exe /node:%computername% /namespace:\\root\microsoftdfs path DfsrMachineConfig get MaxOfflineTimeInDays

Step 2 – Prepare the domain controllers that are in an error state

1. First, install appropriate updates.
2. Then, backup SYSVOL data.

Step 3 – Recover DFS Replication on the domain controllers in the error state

If the environment has two domain controllers we have to check if a dirty shutdown took place on either domain controller. In some cases, we may find the second domain controller waiting to complete SYSVOL initialization.

This in turn logs a 4614 event indicating that DFS Replication is waiting to accomplish initial replication. In other words, it will not log a 4604 event indicating that DFS Replication has initialized SYSVOL. There are a couple of scenarios in this situation. Let’s take a look at each one:

• Content freshness is enabled on both domain controllers:

  Here, the second domain controller will wait before performing initial synchronization.
• Content freshness is not triggered or enabled on both domain controllers:

  In this case, run the ResumeReplication WMI method on the first domain controller. This in turn results in logging an event ID 4602. Then run the dfsrdiag pollad command on the second domain controller in order to trigger it to complete the initial sync.

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Conclusion

To sum up, our skilled Support Engineers at Bobcares demonstrated how to troubleshoot missing SYSVOL and Netlogon shares.