Anoop's

While troubleshooting some weird site replication issues today it was decided that we needed to force a sync of our SCCM 2007 site with it’s parent as the child primary was missing some OSD advertisements. So after some research the following is the process of forcing a resync between a Parent site and it’s Child site.

1. Identify the Parent Site

On the site with problems (the site you want to get re-synced) in the SCCM console expand Site Management, Site Code and right click on the Site, choose Properties, note what the Parent Site:  value is set to.

2. Logon to the Parent Site

Logon to the Parent site with the same account that you installed SCCM on that site with, eg: if you installed the Parent site while logged on as SMSadmin then login as SMSAdmin otherwise you may get errors in the preinst command.

3. Run the preinst command

Locate the SCCM installation directory and open a command prompt and browse to X:\SMS\bin\i3860000409 where X: is the drive you installed SCCM on. Execute the following command

preinst.exe /syncchild XXX

where XXX is the SITE CODE of the child site you want to sync. The following should be output

F:\SMS\bin\i3860000409>preinst.exe /syncchild ABC

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager v4.00 (Build 6487)
Copyright (C) 2005 Microsoft Corp.

Synchronized child site ABC

Note:- that as this is a full sync that it will take many hours to sync everything.

4. What Logs to look at ?

Pay close attention to the following logs on Parent and Child site

Despool.log – Records incoming site-to-site communication transfers.

Replmgr.log – Records the replication of files between the site server components and the Scheduler component.

Sender.log – Records files that are sent to other child and parent sites.

Related reading:-

1. Understanding Site to Site Communication in SMS/SCCM

2. SCCM Object Replication Issue From Central To Primary

3. preinst.exe /syncchild <– Not a known site?

4. Technet: Hierarchy Maintenance Tool Syntax

5. Technet: New deep-dive document: Component details and data flow for site-to-site replication in SMS 2003 and Configuration Manager 2007

See the Orginal Post