Active Directory

One of the issues that sometimes made managing group policies difficult in Windows XP and in Windows Server 2003 was the non centralized nature of the group policy template files. For example, Microsoft offers downloadable templates that allow you to manage Microsoft Office via group policy. Even so, these templates are not automatically available from…

How does Ntdsutil.exe know it’s in Directory Restore mode? NTDSUTIL is a tool used for many Active Directory database maintenance tasks, such as defragmenting the DB, moving the DB and/or log files to a different place, cleaning the DB and more. NTDSUTIL will allow you to perform many of it’s functions while the DC is…

How do I defragment the Active Directory to make it smaller in size? The size of NTDS.DIT will often be different sizes across the domain controllers in a domain. Remember that Active Directory is a multi-master independent model where updates are occurring in each of the domain controllers with the changes being replicated over time…

How can I easily perform management operations in AD from a customized Taskpad? As your AD infrastructure grows, and the number of objects within it constantly changes, you might find that managing the growing number of users, groups and computers is becoming more than a headache. Fortunately for us, one of Active Directory’s best features…

Actually you do NOT need to do anything… Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory uses circular logging for maintaining transactions in the database (Ntds.dit). The log files are maintained until the data they contain is committed to the database. It uses these log files to recover transactions if the database is shut down in an inconsistent state…