I wanted to follow-up on a previous post and respond to a newsgroup post with this loopback policy processing model. I am taking the inspiration for this from the newsgroup post though there is some deviation for the sake of the illustration.  Okay, let’s go. In our globally-applied Default Domain Policy, a screen saver timeout is set to 30 minutes. Right now, this is the only screen saver timeout policy in the domain. This policy setting exists in the User Configuration portion of... [More]

It’s not the first time that we’ve talked about it and it certainly won’t be the last – Microsoft’s well-intentioned proliferation of information sometimes can actually create confusion through incomplete information or contradiction, perceived or real.  Loopback policy processing is one of those technologies that is destined to fit into this bucket. It comes up pretty frequently in the newsgroups and not long ago we responded to one such question here:  ... [More]

You’ve seen the infomercials where they tout some kitchen product as the silver bullet, right?  You know…it slices, dices, and even makes Julienne fries!  It’s the catch-all device that can pretty much do just about anything – even help with the kids calculus homework.  Well, I think Active Directory should have its own infomercial because it truly can do just about anything (I’m starting to think it may even make Julienne fries)! Many of you have p... [More]

During my accreditation process for the AD Health Check (the predecessor to the ADRAP) we spent a week with our peers in a brief review. As part of the accreditation process we were each assigned a technical area of AD to present in front of the class. I was assigned AD replication by our instructors and I was both excited and nervous. Excited because I had always loved and been interested by AD replication. Nervous, of course, because I had to mock teach it to my very talented peers and I knew ... [More]

It was my first AD environment that I owned and I was much more excited than I was wise.  I made lots and lots of mistakes, some of them benign and some of them…well, didn’t go unnoticed.  It was a medium-sized organization based on Windows 2000 and we had quite a few sites and domain controllers.  It was a true hub and spoke topology and there were a fair number of site links back to our hub site.  We had decent and reliable connectivity and found that we could ... [More]

The nature of Microsoft’s directory service clients provides for inherent fault-tolerance in the event of a failure.  There are often questions about how, or if, this failover works properly.  In this post, we are going to see the failover in action.  Before we get started though, there are some conditions that can prevent this standard behavior which are worth discussing.  This is not a comprehensive list but these are a few common reasons that a client may not failover: ... [More]

The Role of the PDC FSMO [More]