I'm currently studying Active Directory, hoping to get up to speed on it to help with securing some clusters we are working with. While reading through how AD does replication, I came across something that seems to be handy-wavey, and I was hoping someone could clarify how it actually works.
According to what I've read, all of the per-attribute replication metadata (Property Version Number, Time Changed, Originating-DC-GUID, etc.) for an object is stored in a nonreplicated attribute on the object called replPropertyMetaData. That makes sense, except some of those values (specifically Time Changed, Originating-DC-GUID, and Originating-USN) have to be replicated to the other DCs, otherwise the other DCs wouldn't know what values to set to them. Are those values specifically extracted and sent across during replication, or is there some other process I'm missing that does this?
