Chapter 4

This chapter deals the global catalog and flexible single master operations roles in the MMC. Global catalogs are used for several purposes, including facilitating object searches in the forest, resolving UPN's, maintaining universal group membership info and maintaining a copy of all objects int he domain. By default, the first domain controller in a forest is designated as the global catalog server. Flexible single master operations roles were discussed in the book next. FSMO roles are single-master roles that one DC in an AD forest or domain can control, and are used so as to minimize errors that could result from having multiple DC's carry out certain procedures, including adding or deleting domains from the AD forest. Three of the domain-specific roles of FSMO are the RID master (assigns relative IDs to domain controllers in the domain), Infrastructure master (updates references between domain objects and other domains) and the PDC emulator (provides backward compatibility with Microsoft .NET domains). Two forest-wide roles in AD are the domain naming master (manages the creation/deletion of domains, domain trees,apps data and partitions in the forest) and the schema master (manages changes in the AD schema). When a FSMO server goes down, roles can be continued by other servers vie either role transfer (moving a role fro mone server to another) or role seizure (moving a role to another server forcibly, usually when a server goes down forever).