Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

How to troubleshoot AD DS database-related issues

AD maintains a multi-master database. Like any other database, there can be data corruptions, crashes, data loss, and so on. In my entire career, I still haven't come across a situation where a full database recovery is required in a production environment. The reason is that an AD DS database keeps replicating to other available DCs and it is very rare that all the available DCs 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 options that can cause 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 failure, we will lose the database...