How To Enable Change Notification On All Site Links

Normally, there are two replication intervals for Active Directory in a Windows domain: Intra-site (replication between DCs in the same site) and Inter-site (replication between DCs in different Active Directory sites).
Intra-site replication is very fast - typically around 15 seconds. This schedule can be configured via the registry using the following values in the HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Service\NTDS\Parameters key:

Replicator notify pause after modify (secs)It is a REG_DWORD value of 15 by default
Replicator notify pause between DSAs (secs)It is a REG_DWORD value of 3 by default

See Microsoft TechNet (Active Directory Replication Tools and Settings) for a thorough explanation of what these keys do.Inter-site replication is dictated by the schedule associated with the replication connection in Active Directory Sites and Services. Using this GUI you can specify that the connector never replicates or to replicate once, twice or four times per hour.

Note: The inter-site replication schedule runs based on the server startup time. For example, if the DC starts up at 12:10pm and the replication connector's schedule is set to twice per hour, replication on this connector will occur at 12:10pm, 12:40pm, etc.

But what if you want Intersite replication to occur more frequently than every 15 minutes? For this, you must enable Change Notification on the Active Directory site link. How you do this depends on which OS is on your DC.

For Windows 2003 Domain Controllers:

• Open ADSIEdit.msc (in the Windows Support Tools) as a Domain Admin
• Open the Configuration naming context
• Navigate to Sites > Inter-Site Transports > IP
• Right-click the siteLink to modify in the results pane and click Properties
• Locate the options attribute and edit the value from 0 to 1
• Click OK and repeat for other siteLinks, as necessary.

For Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controllers:
You can use the same method as Windows Server 2003 DCs or you can edit the values directly from AD Sites and Services, as follows.

• Locate the Inter-Site Transport site link to modify, typically DEFAULTIPSITELINK, in AD Sites and Services
• Right-click the site link and choose Properties
• Click the Attribute Editor tab
• Locate the options attribute and edit the value from 0 to 1
• Click OK and repeat for other Site Links, as necessary.

I also wrote two VBScripts for displaying and configuring Change Notification:

• DisplayChangeNotification.vbs displays the current value of the options attribute on each site link in the Active Directory domain where it is run.
• EnableChangeNotification.vbs will enable Change Notification on all site links in the Active Directory domain where it is run by changing the options value to 1.

Both scripts are in the ChangeNotificationScripts.zip file, located here.