Active Directory Cookbook

Chapter 3. Domain Controllers, Global Catalogs, and FSMOs

Introduction

Domain controllers are servers that host an Active Directory domain and provide authentication and directory services to clients. A Domain controller is authoritative for a single domain, but can store partial read-only copies of objects in other domains in the forest if it is enabled as a global catalog server. All domain controllers in a forest also host the Configuration and Schema Naming Contexts, which are replicated to all domain controllers in a forest.

Active Directory is a multi-master directory, meaning that updates can be issued to any domain controller, but some tasks cannot be distributed to all servers due to concurrency issues. For example, if two different domain controllers made conflicting updates to the schema, the impact could be severe and could result in data loss. For this reason, Active Directory supports Flexible Single Master Operations (FSMO) roles. For each role there is only one domain controller that acts as the role owner and performs the tasks associated with the role. See Recipe 3.25 for more information on FSMO roles.

The Anatomy of a Domain Controller

Each domain controller is represented in Active Directory by several objects; the two main ones are a computer object and an nTDSDSA object. The computer object is necessary because a domain controller needs to be represented as a security principal like any other type of computer in Active Directory. The default location in a domain ...