Category — Group Policy

The Windows Event viewer can sometimes seem like a blessing and a curse. Sometimes the messages can really help you discover what might be going wrong with the operating system or an application. Then Microsoft began to include hyperlinks that would help us get more information on what the error message was trying to tell us. But most times when you clicked on that hyperlink, all that you get is something to the effect of "Sorry. We don’t know what it means either."

So, I have had my share of disappointments with messages from the event viewer.

However, recently, I got an error message in the event viewer that not only told me what had gone wrong (and in language that I could understand), the message actually told me how to fix the problem. And I did not have to go out to a web page either!

The problem that I had been trying to fix was that some computers on my network were not getting the Group Policy firewall settings that I had recently changed. Some computers were getting the settings, but others, even when using a forced GPUPDATE would still not update the firewall setting.

After weeks of searching, I found myself in the place I should have gone to in the beginning - the Windows Event Viewer of one of my Domain Controllers.

In the File Replication Service event viewer there was an error message related to replication of data between my two Domain Controllers. This would explain my situation. Since the two  domain controllers were out of sync, this domain controller had the older firewall settings. Some of my computers were getting their updates using the older settings from this domain controller.

Now normally I would then have to search the Microsoft Knowledge Base to figure out how to solve this. But read the details of this error message (isn’t it pure poetry?)

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    NtFrs
Event Category:    None
Event ID:    13568
Date:        9/12/2008
Time:        3:13:07 AM
User:        N/A
Computer:    Domain Controller
Description:
The File Replication Service has detected that the replica set "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)" is in JRNL_WRAP_ERROR.
Replica set name is    : "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)"
Replica root path is   : "c:\windows\sysvol\domain"
Replica root volume is : "\\.\C:"
A Replica set hits JRNL_WRAP_ERROR when the record that it is trying to read from the NTFS USN journal is not found.  This can occur because of one of the following reasons.
[1] Volume "\\.\C:" has been formatted.
[2] The NTFS USN journal on volume "\\.\C:" has been deleted.
[3] The NTFS USN journal on volume "\\.\C:" has been truncated. Chkdsk can truncate the journal if it finds corrupt entries at the end of the journal.
[4] File Replication Service was not running on this computer for a long time.
[5] File Replication Service could not keep up with the rate of Disk IO activity on "\\.\C:".
 Setting the "Enable Journal Wrap Automatic Restore" registry parameter to 1 will cause the following recovery steps to be taken to automatically recover from this error state.
[1] At the first poll, which will occur in 5 minutes, this computer will be deleted from the replica set. If you do not want to wait 5 minutes, then run "net stop ntfrs" followed by "net start ntfrs" to restart the File Replication Service.
[2] At the poll following the deletion this computer will be re-added to the replica set. The re-addition will trigger a full tree sync for the replica set.
WARNING: During the recovery process data in the replica tree may be unavailable. You should reset the registry parameter described above to 0 to prevent automatic recovery from making the data unexpectedly unavailable if this error condition occurs again.
To change this registry parameter, run regedit.
Click on Start, Run and type regedit.
Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
Click down the key path:
   "System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtFrs\Parameters"
Double click on the value name
   "Enable Journal Wrap Automatic Restore"
and update the value.
If the value name is not present you may add it with the New->DWORD Value function under the Edit Menu item. Type the value name exactly as shown above.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

It’s just amazing! The solution is in the error message details!

After I performed the steps outlined in the error message, all of my clients now have the proper firewall settings.

This is error documentation at its best!

So, my recommendation from this experience is this. If you are having a problem with Group Policy settings not being applied to all of your clients, check the File Replication Service Event log on all of your domain controllers for any error messages.  Who knows, it may give you the solution to your problems.