In this section we are going through some of the more advanced uses and possibilities of three tools that will undoubtedly be of great help in diagnosing either AD problems or replication problems.

The three tools that almost every person who needs to perform troubleshooting on Windows Server 2003 should be familiar with are NetDiag.exe, DcDiag.exe, and Repadmin.exe.

All three are command-line utilities, which implies that they can be run from a Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista workstation, and that they are standalone executables that can be copied from one machine to another. A nice feature of these tools is that they connect remotely to the DCs via the Remote Procedure Call service (RPC) and therefore you do not need to log on to the DCs. The only requirement for most of them is that they need to run from a machine that is a member of the domain and has access to the network.