MCSA Handling a Windows 2000 Network Environment Active Index Structure

By Neil Quinn

This chapter covers the physical and logical structure of Active Index deployment scenarios , as well as a fundamental understanding of the uses of each level of grouping in the centralised administration over widely distributed resources.

Terms you'll need to understand:

Active Catalog

Domain controller

Trust

Organizational unit

Global catalog

FSMO roles

Domain

Tree

Forest

Site

Bridgehead server

Techniques you'll need to master:

Describing the purpose of the Windows 2000 Active Index worldwide catalogue

Identifying the FSMO roles and their basic purposes

Recognizing the different sorts of trusts including one- and two-way , as well as transitive and nontransitive trusts

Identifying the levels of administrative grouping, including organizational units, domains, trees, and forests

Windows 2000 employs a decentralized database in which all security elements like users, computers, and printers are registered so as to provide concentrated access and management of resources inside a distributed network environment. This database is called the Active Catalog.

This chapter covers the physical and logical structure of Active Directory deployment eventualities alongside a basic understanding of the uses of each level of grouping in the focused administration over widely distributed resources.

Active Directory Structure Overview

Users of Windows NT and earlier operating systems might be familiar with the idea of a p-2-p network of PCs, commonly referred to as a workgroup. In a workgroup, each PC maintains its own list of users and the access to local resources granted to each. Not one of the systems in this configuration provide administration over the wholeâ€"all act as equals (peers). Although this can work for as much as 5 or 10 computers, the issues of administration, configuration, and deployment of systems in bigger configurations mandate some type of centralised administration and coordination.

Domain Controllers

In Windows NT, the idea of the domain was introduced. A domain is a grouping of resources including computers, printers, groups, and users that are maintained in a concentrated database of resources located on a supervisory machine called a domain controller (DC). In Windows NT, all updates to this database occurred within one domain controller chosen as the primary domain controller (PDC), with all the other domain controller servers elected as backup domain controllers (BDCs). The backup domain controllers receive updates to their local copy of the listing from the number one domain controller on a constant schedule.

In order to provide support for larger-scale deployments in which the security elements (like users) in one domain may be granted access to resources found in another domain, multiple domains can be joined thru a connection called a trust. Trusts will be covered in more detail later in this chapter in the section titled "Trusts."

The limitation of the NT domain system was that all updates to the database had to occur on the primary domain controller, and only then would be propagated out to all backup domain controllers on the subsequent prepared update cycle. This will cause significant delays before changes are propagated to all remote backup domain controllers, and may prevent changes outright if a network connection to the main domain controller is not available. In addition, the process may be rather bandwidth-intensive if a full-domain synchronization of domain controllers is enacted, as the number one domain controller must update the local copy of the domain database on all backup domain controllers throughout the domain. This can prove to be a very serious bottleneck when a deployment is distributed over a sizeable number of servers or a broad geographic area.

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