All
A colleague of mine accidentally deleted a DFSR namespace on our W2K3 r2 domain yesterday when meaning to delete a target(!), we've followed KB969382 to restore the DFS configuration blob back into AD from a recent backup and the namespace configuration has returned and DFS is functional from a connectivity point of view, but the namespace appears to have lost it's link to the Replication Groups we set up for the folders within the namespace.
Replication itself still works but if we go into DFS Management - Namespaces - <Our Namespace>, select one of the replicated folders then select the "Replication" tab it says "Replication Status: Not Configured", so the link between the namespace and the replication group seems to have been lost and replication is now running as standalone effectively. If we try to set p replication from the wizard here it fails with "The following folder targets cannot be added as DFS Replication members.... because the shared folder path (path) is already replicated on the server using replication group (\\domain\namespace\folder)", so it appears to know something about the replication groups but just not the link between the two but because of this broken link I assume if we add a new server to the namespace it wouldnt automatically get added to the replication group?
We have a lot of data in our DFS with relatively slow links so we need to avoid replicating from scratch so would like some advice on how to fix the issue, is it as simple as deleting the replication groups and recreating them or will this cause a complete replication to each target from scratch?
thanks