Book Image

Mastering Active Directory. - Second Edition

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory. - Second Edition

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory (AD) is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables inter-operation with other directories. This book will first help you brush up on the AD architecture and fundamentals, before guiding you through core components, such as sites, trust relationships, objects, and attributes. You will then explore AD schemas, LDAP, RMS, and security best practices to understand objects and components and how they can be used effectively. Next, the book will provide extensive coverage of AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016, and help you explore their new features. Furthermore, you will learn to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure and effective manner. You’ll later discover Azure AD Module, and learn to automate administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. All along, this updated second edition will cover content based on the latest version of Active Directory, PowerShell 5.1 and LDAP. By the end of this book, you’ll be well versed with best practices and troubleshooting techniques for improving security and performance in identity infrastructures.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Active Directory Planning, Design, and Installation
8
Section 2: Active Directory Administration
13
Section 3: Active Directory Service Management
18
Section 4: Best Practices and Troubleshooting

How to troubleshoot AD DS database-related issues

AD maintains a multi-master database. Like any other database, there can be problems such as data corruption, crashes, and data loss. In my entire career, I still haven't come across a situation where a full database recovery was required in a production environment. The reason for this is that an AD DS database keeps replicating to other available domain controllers and it is very rare for all the available domain controllers to crash at the same time and lose data. Unlike other AD issues, there aren't many options for AD DS database troubleshooting.

In the following table, I have listed a few reasons for AD DS database-related issues:

Issue

Description

Hardware failure

The AD database is located in C:\Windows\NTDS. This path can be changed, but it cannot be hosted on separate systems. If there is any hardware...