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In Windows Server 2003, the replication process is responsible for keeping each domain controller updated with the latest Active Directory information. The replication process is also responsible for keeping DNS replicas synchronised. As you can see, replication is a very important part of the Windows Server 2003 network operating system. So what do you do when replication fails? For that matter, how do you even know when a failure has occurred? Here are some answers to these questions and how to fix the replication process. How does replication work? Before you can fix the replication process, you need to understand how it works. As I mentioned earlier, replication is used to keep both domain controllers and DFS replicas synchronized. There are a few other tasks that use replication as well. For the purposes of this article, I will focus my discussion on Active Directory replication that occurs between domain controllers. If you have ever worked with Windows NT, then you are probabl

The Trouble with Names For those who missed my past columns ("Name Resolvers: WINS vs. DNS," November 1996; "NetBIOS Names and WINS," January 1997; and "Inside a NetBIOS Name Resolution," March 1997), you can find them on the  Windows NT Magazine  Web site at http://www.winntmag.com. The articles show that NT and TCP/IP have a problem: names. We want servers to have nice, human-friendly names such as, in my network, Aldebaran, Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Elnath. (They are the brightest and second-brightest stars in the Orion and Taurus constellations. The brightest are the primary domain controllers--PDCs, and the second-brightest are the backup domain controllers--BDCs.) Those names are easier to remember than IP addresses such as 198.34.57.44, 198.34.57.11, 198.34.57.90, and 198.34.57.26. To satisfy both us and the computers, networking software converts the human-friendly names into IP addresses. The term for that conversion is  name resolution,  and it ty

What do WINS and DNS do? Windows NT 3.5 offered the Windows Internet Name Service (WINS). Most of us had no idea what it did, but we soon figured out that we pretty much needed it. The rest of the Internet world seemed to be using something similar, but incompatible: the Domain Name System (DNS). What  is  WINS, and, well, why  isn't  it DNS? The short answer is that WINS and DNS have somewhat different jobs. Consider the two following commands, both issued to the same server: ping server01.bigfirm.com and net use * \\server01 \mainshr The ping command refers to the server as server01.big firm.com. The net use command calls the same server server01. The difference is important. Why Two Different Names? The ping command is a platform-independent, TCP/IP/Internet kind of command. It's valid on UNIX, VMS, Macintosh, and MVS--so long as the machine is running a TCP/IP protocol stack. On any of these platforms, you can issue a ping only if you're running TCP/IP. The command

T he Active Directory Database is Stored in  %SYSTEM ROOT%\NDTS  folder. The file is called as ntds.dit.  Along with this file there are other files also present in this folder. The files are created when you run  dcpromo.  The list of files and use of those files are listed below 1.  ntds.dit :  This is the main database file for active directory. 2.  edb.log :  When a transaction performed to ad database, like writing some data first the data will be stored to this file. And after that it will be sent to database. So the system performance will be depends on how this data from edb.log file will be written to ntds.dit. multiple .log files will be created according to the requirement. 3.  res1.log :  Used as reserve space in the case when drive had low space. It is basically 10MB in size and created when we run dcpromo. 4.  res2.log :  Same as res1.log. It is also 10MB in size and the purspose also same. 5.  edb.chk :  This file records the transactions committed to ad data

Introduction Flexible Single Master Operations (FSMO) is a feature of Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD). FSMOs are specialized domain controller (DC) tasks, used where standard data transfer and update methods are inadequate. AD normally relies on multiple peer DCs, each with a copy of the AD database, being synchronized by multi-master replication. The tasks which are not suited to multi-master replication, and are viable only with a single-master database, are the FSMOs. The FSMO roles are also called Single Master Operations or Operations Master, FSMO is sometimes pronounced as “fizmo”. What is the need of FSMO roles? Active directory is multi master replication model. Meaning clients can register their records to any available Active directory domain controller and have access to resources within active directory NTDS.DIT database. The purpose of having FSMO roles is being cause by Multi master replication model. In this model there has to be a way of preventing the c

Here are the pre-requisites for a HA VMM server installation: 1. Failover clustering feature added, cluster created and configured (Windows Server 2008 R2 is the minimum OS version supported as node servers) 2. Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows 7 installed on all nodes that will be used as VMM servers  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=696dd665-9f76-4177-a811-39c26d3b3b34&displaylang=en 3. Server and instance name of a SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 cluster or remote SQL server (best practice to use clustered SQL Server with HA VMM servers) 4. For our DKM (Distributed Key Management) requirement, either logged on, installing VMM with an account that has “edit” permission on the Active Directory container (can be a lower level container doesn’t have to be the root) or DKM group pre-created on Active Directory and its name available to provide at setup (more on DKM requirement later) HA VMM Installation Steps When we were designin