I would agree that's a bad question. Using tricks or hacks to get a non-standard result is poor questioning.
I would suggest that be changed to "What is the default minimum time......" and the answer changed to 15 minutes.
That is far more useful information, which is the point of the challenge after all
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15 seconds (though, should probably be a few more second to allow the notified partner to connect back to actually pull the changes). That's the minimum replication interval when the site link is set to allow notification (or change) based replication.That's the minimum replication delay intra-site, as well.
The question asked for the "absolute minimum."
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I got that question yesterday and didn't have the energy to really argue it. 15 Min is the minimum you can set without getting in and modifying things and that is what most people probably put to get a 90% wrong answer.
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Semicolon wrote:
15 seconds (though, should probably be a few more second to allow the notified partner to connect back to actually pull the changes). That's the minimum replication interval when the site link is set to allow notification (or change) based replication.That's the minimum replication delay intra-site, as well.
The question asked for the "absolute minimum."
I'd disagree with that justification. The question maker (QM) said "not counting manual" without being more clear on how that is to be interpreted, so it should not be assumed settings changes. If the QM wanted to justify an answer of 15 seconds after making changes, they should have termed it something like "absolute minimum after making (x) changes" to the system". Also, while I don't know the "obscure" link that CharlesHTN refers to, since I didn't take the question and don't see it, but I've seen enough questions that reference questionable blogs and obscure blogs, which is not good practice. One should attempt to use better references to justify they question, or maybe consider it's just not one worth posting.
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CharlesHTN wrote:
This was the site given as reference in the questions explanation:
Yeah, not trying to hate on that guy's blog, but that's a poor use for citation. It would have been a lot more professional use something from a more notable and established technical site, ideally Microsoft's own documentation.
This is a hack without explicitly telling you it's a hack and asking what is the safe minimum replication time you should use after doing a hack. Even going by the blogger's own post, he recommended that it would probably only be a good idea on a 20mb/s or faster connection, but not on one slower. Did the question poster mention anything about ".... that are located in two different sites with a minimum of 20mb/s or greater connection..." No,they didn't.
I feel question should definitely be pulled.
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Luis C. wrote:
CharlesHTN wrote:
This was the site given as reference in the questions explanation:
Yeah, not trying to hate on that guy's blog, but that's a poor use for citation. It would have been a lot more professional use something from a more notable and established technical site, ideally Microsoft's own documentation.
This is a hack without explicitly telling you it's a hack and asking what is the safe minimum replication time you should use after doing a hack. Even going by the blogger's own post, he recommended that it would probably only be a good idea on a 20mb/s or faster connection, but not on one slower. Did the question poster mention anything about ".... that are located in two different sites with a minimum of 20mb/s or greater connection..." No,they didn't.
I feel question should definitely be pulled.
I'd hate to see it be pulled. I *DID* learn something from it, which accomplishes a goal of the Daily Challenge. BUT...I'd like to see it reconfigured so as not to throw people off. Something like this I think would preserve the posters intent, while eliminating the "trick question" part of it: "What is the absolute minimum time interval for Active Directory replication between two Domain Controllers that are located in two different sites, taking into consideration the ability to manually tweak settings?"
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Luis C. wrote:
Semicolon wrote:
15 seconds (though, should probably be a few more second to allow the notified partner to connect back to actually pull the changes). That's the minimum replication interval when the site link is set to allow notification (or change) based replication.That's the minimum replication delay intra-site, as well.
The question asked for the "absolute minimum."
I'd disagree with that justification. The question maker (QM) said "not counting manual" without being more clear on how that is to be interpreted, so it should not be assumed settings changes. If the QM wanted to justify an answer of 15 seconds after making changes, they should have termed it something like "absolute minimum after making (x) changes" to the system".
Where do you draw the line at manual changes? You have to manually set the option flag, just like you have to manually reduce the interval to 15 minutes. Notification/change-based intra-site replication is a generally well known and well documented feature of Active Directory - just because it doesn't have a GUI check box doesn't necessarily mean its "settings tweaking."
Besides, "urgent" replication (which was a named exclusion) doesn't even happen across a site boundary unless this setting is configured.
I think the reference in the question (which I can't see) should be updated to something more definitive than the guy's blog.
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It went across my line, so we agree to disagree.
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It also isn't that a change between sites WILL take 15 minutes, it is that all of the changes replicate at 15 minutes if so configured, so if you make a change 14:50 since the last replication happened, that change could get replicated 10 seconds later.
This is related to the fact that if the replication interval is 15 minutes, the AVERAGE time to replication of a change is half that, or 7.5 minutes. Based on the fact that as I understand it, how quickly a change is replicated depends on when the change is made relative to to next replication cycle, seconds is clearly more correct than minutes, and I would assume 15 seconds more correct than 30 seconds. Now, if there were options of 1 second, 5 seconds, and 10 seconds, I wouldn't know which to choose.
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It seams that many people did not understand my question. Maybe I am to blame for that, but I didn't expect for this question to have many correct answers anyway. Because this is very specific settings in Active Directory, and it is not some thing I found that many AD Admins knows about, and it is not something that you can Google easily.
I found that people thought I was not talking about AD sites but physical locations which is not correct, I was only talking about AD sites even when I just wrote "site".
Using Inter-site Replication between AD sites is not necessary anymore because of huge internet speeds.
It seams that many people did not understand my question. Maybe I am to blame for that, but I didn't expect for this question to have many correct answers anyway. Because this is very specific settings in Active Directory, and it is not some thing I found that many AD Admins knows about, and it is not some ting that you can Google easily.
I found that people thought I was not talking about AD sites but physical locations which is not correct, I was only talking about AD sites even when I just wrote "site".
Using Inter-site Replication between AD sites is not necessary any more because of huge internet speeds.
Not if all sites are directly connected, but if you have a star configuration of sites, then inter-site being properly set up is absolutely a requirement, and I would still argue best practice to set up correct sites configuration regardless of connectivity speed.
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Kenny8416 wrote:
Not if all sites are directly connected, but if you have a star configuration of sites, then inter-site being properly set up is absolutely a requirement, and I would still argue best practice to set up correct sites configuration regardless of connectivity speed.
Regardless of AD Site Links configuration, be it a star, a full mesh or something else, I don't see the reason why to use Inter-site Replication between AD sites. I do not argue against AD sites, I always use them, but I use only Intra-site Replication between AD sites. Of course AD Sites and AD Site Links must always reflect actual network topology.
Maybe if you have extremely large multinational company you would use Inter-site Replication between AD sites across the world...
Zoran Jankov wrote:
Kenny8416 wrote:
Not if all sites are directly connected, but if you have a star configuration of sites, then inter-site being properly set up is absolutely a requirement, and I would still argue best practice to set up correct sites configuration regardless of connectivity speed.
Regardless of AD Site Links configuration, be it a star, a full mesh or something else, I don't see the reason why to use Inter-site Replication between AD sites. I do not argue against AD sites, I always use them, but I use only Intra-site Replication between AD sites. Of course AD Sites and AD Site Links must always reflect actual network topology.
Maybe if you have extremely large multinational company you would use Inter-site Replication between AD sites across the world...
We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. I've seen too many screwed up KCC results because of badly configured inter-site set up. Perhamps I'm just old school and learned it on my MCSE for NT4 days, who knows.
Back to the question though. I've read the link to the explanation above, and I don't see any reference specifically to 15 seconds.
I also see a note that it will fail for entries not created by the KCC. Therefore I think the question should be pulled or amended to use standard functionality. To me this is a hack, and a poor and unecessary one at that. Sorry.
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My theory on the % of people getting a question right in a 4 answer multiple choice is that you would expect approx 25% even if people were guessing.
If the number is significantly below this (currently at 16%) then it suggests that perhaps people are being misled by the other answers a little or even that the "correct" answer is wrong.
If there is going to be an answer that most wouldn't expect such as 15 seconds, then the other 3 answers should not include a widely known default such as 15 minutes as that is a trap. This is what I suspect has happened here.
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Zoran Jankov wrote:
Using Inter-site Replication between AD sites is not necessary anymore because of huge internet speeds.
I know personally a number of sites that are still reliant on DSL or slow satellite links because they are in very remote areas, such as mining sites in the state of New Mexico in the US, for example. It's becoming increasingly less, common, but still not uncommon. You are asking people to consider high speed Internet the norm, but not letting them know they should be thinking outside the norm or beyond default parameters.
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Nobody mentioned the hint: "AD site replication". I would say that term implies inter-site, not intra-site. SO, that even more points to the 15 minute interval.
I got this question today, and I'm gonna pass on answering it.
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Briser_fae_the_broch wrote:
My theory on the % of people getting a question right in a 4 answer multiple choice is that you would expect approx 25% even if people were guessing.
If the number is significantly below this (currently at 16%) then it suggests that perhaps people are being misled by the other answers a little or even that the "correct" answer is wrong.
If there is going to be an answer that most wouldn't expect such as 15 seconds, then the other 3 answers should not include a widely known default such as 15 minutes as that is a trap. This is what I suspect has happened here.
I think the wording at the end "not counting manual and urgent replication" is a significant part of what skews the random guess percentage down. If I'm just guessing, this wording tells me to eliminate 15 and 30 seconds and pick between 15 or 30 minutes. After all, WHY would you need manual or "urgent" replication if it's going to happen in seconds anyway? You can't even get a manual replication started before it would be happening automatically!
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I replied on the question as well but I don't see any good way to salvage this questions and have the 15 seconds answer actually be fully correct without doing a complete and total rewrite that would be drastically different from the original. The inter-site replication interval, which is what is implied here, has a hard-set minimum of 15 minutes and there is no getting around that fact. The intra-site replication mechanism that uses notifications which the sources provided for the question reference is out of scope and not the same thing whatsoever. This particular hack/workaround is basically directing notifications designed to be kept within a site to additionally be sent to an AD server at a separate site (which I'd suspect is not supported by Microsoft even though their product allows for it) but doing that functionally makes those AD servers part of the same site, not a separate site.
The best alternative phrasing I can think of is " What is the absolute minimum time interval for Active Directory updates between two Domain Controllers that are located in two different sites, not counting manual and urgent replication?" (changes in bold) but, even then, the 15 seconds would not be correct because, depending on when you made a change, the update could be instantaneous because (as noted in kevinmhsieh's reply) you could have happened to have just made a change as the next intra-site replication notification was scheduled to go out.
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MerlinYoda, I think you’ve misunderstood.15 seconds is correct; no question rewrite necessary. You are missing the fact that intersite and intrastate replication can be configured the same; based upon notifications and not a time interval.This is NOT the same as manual replication.
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I don’t think this is a trick question.Either you know it, or you don’t. There’s no shame I’m not knowing it.Changing the wording won’t really do anything other than (maybe) provide better search clues for somebody who doesn’t already know the answer - which (I feel) defeats the purpose.—
If anything, the source/reference link should be updated to a Microsoft site the states the change notification interval is 15 seconds (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2003/cc772726(v=ws.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN#domain-controller-notification-of-changes), with a link to a Microsoft article detailing inter-site notification based replication (https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-directory-services-team/configuring-change-notification-on-a-manually-created/ba-p/400188)
—
Why does it matter what the random guess percentage is?
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Semicolon wrote:
MerlinYoda, I think you’ve misunderstood.15 seconds is correct; no question rewrite necessary. You are missing the fact that intersite and intrastate replication can be configured the same; based upon notifications and not a time interval.This is NOT the same as manual replication.
You've misread my statement if that's what you think I'm saying.
I'm not discounting the fact that the link between two AD servers joined to different AD sites can be configured such that it will have a refresh period of 15 seconds if you define certain advanced custom settings which enables the notification method that is used with intra-site AD servers. Although, based on the citations provided in the question comments, file synchronizations are still limited to a refresh period of 15 minutes between servers on different sites such that anything in the SYSVOL share will still be subject to that limitation. From https://dirteam.com/paul/2011/04/06/active-directory-replication-types/: "Once enabled partners in different sites will be treated equivalently as intrasite replication, with the exception this only holds for NTDS, NTFRS still works on the schedule."
What I am saying is that that the way the question is currently phrased implies a very specific type of connection with a very specific type of behavior and that is the problem with it. The minimum refresh interval for the inter-site refresh method is 15 minutes and nothing in the question even hints at advanced custom modifications such that you are effectively creating a hybrid link. In fact, it goes just short of implying the opposite such that it comes off as a trick question (especially seeing as the percentage correct is less than what you'd expect from people just guessing randomly).
Here is a heavily modified question loosely based off of the original such that 15 seconds could be a fully correct answer:
What is the minimum possible refresh interval for NTDS replication that a link between two Domain Controllers joined to different AD sites could be configured to use, not including manual and urgent replication?
