I know when you manually kick off Repadmin and specify source/destination DC it's going to ignore any site, site link and site link bridge settings as long as the DCs are reachable over RPC to each other.
The question is when KCC(ISTG) calculate replication connections, will it always strictly respect the site link settings, even though some DC is down or not all sites are fully routed? Consider scenarios below
Three sites A,B,C. Auto site link bridging is disabled. Site link A-B, B-C are enabled
1) Domain X has DC1,2,3 in site A,B,C respectively. Assume DC2 is down, will DC1 and DC3 tries to replicate with each other? There is no route avaialble given the site settings but it's the only possible way to replicate which KCC can figure out.
2) Domain X has DC1,3 in site A,C respectively. Another domain Y in the same forest place DC2 in site B. In this case KCC will not find any link can connect DC1 and DC3, will DC2 act as "store-and-forward" for the replication of domain X partition? Or DC1&DC3 replicate directly? Or will replicatoin never occur? (though DC2 itself doens't hold a replica of that)