Active Directory

Looking to retire a domain controller? Daniel Petri shows you how to remove Active Directory from a domain controller before you do.

Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) was released on the 19th of October 2005. You can download SP2 for Exchange 2003 right here: Download Exchange 2003 SP2 (109mb) Required Patches Currently, if you’re running Exchange Server 2003 with SP2 there are no security-related patches that you should apply.

Deciding how many Global Catalog Servers to have on your network, and where to place those servers can be tricky. If there are too few Global Catalog Servers, you could cause severe performance problems or possibly a single point of failure. At the same time though, having too many Global Catalog Servers can also cause…

How can I determine who are the current FSMO Roles holders in my domain/forest? Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory domains utilize a Single Operation Master method called FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operation), as described in Understanding FSMO Roles in Active Directory. The five FSMO roles are: Schema master – Forest-wide and one per forest. Domain naming…

Can I rename my Windows 2000 Domain? The short answer is YES and NO. 🙂 You can rename a Windows 2000 Server AD Domain only if it’s still configured as a Mixed mode domain. Note: Windows Server 2003 AD Domains CAN be renamed (see Windows 2003 Domain Rename page for more info). MS KB 292541…

How do I automatically upgrade a server to a domain controller during installation? You can automatically run DCPROMO during an unattended installation. Enter the command ​dcpromo /answer:%path_to_answer_file% You’ll see a dialog box that says DCPROMO is running in unattended mode. Then, the machine will reboot. You can also add DCPROMO to the unattended file that‘s…

We all know that Windows Active Directory (AD) Group Policy is very powerful. It can apply policies on the PCs in your Windows AD domain. However, the list of policies is limited as are the scheduling and reporting of those policies. While you might be able to run a Powershell script or VB script on…

How can I raise the domain function level in a Windows Server 2003-based domain? Functional levels are an extension of the mixed/native mode concept introduced in Windows 2000 to activate new Active Directory features after all the domain controllers in the domain or forest are running the Windows Server 2003 operating system. When a computer…

As you probably read in my previous articles – “Recovering Deleted Items in Active Directory” and “Restore Windows Server 2003 Active Directory“, an administrator might sometime need to restore deleted objects from the Active Directory database. You see, when an object is deleted from Active Directory, it is not immediately erased, but is marked for…

How do I to prevent overloading on the first Windows 2000 or Windows Server 2003 domain controller as I upgrade my Windows NT 4.0 domain? The overloading effect takes place under the following set of conditions: You have a Microsoft Windows NT 4.0-based domain. You upgrade several computers in the domain to Windows 2000 or…