A couple of questions to fill out the picture: How many clients at each site? What kinds of clients (ME/98, NT4, W2K, XP, etc) Do you have any idea of how much _available_ bandwidth there is on the link? Where is the PDC emulator? I'm guessing it is in office A where the first DC lives.
-gil -----Original Message----- From: Friese, Casey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 12:00 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ActiveDir] AD Design Guidance I have uncovered what I believe is a problem with our Active Directory design. I'm looking for assurance that it is indeed a problem judging from the symptoms that I am seeing and I'm also looking for recommendations on how to correct it. I've walked into the company just weeks after a consultant started implementing the AD design. Now, 8 months later and 10 servers later I believe that the design is flawed. Here are my symptoms: Any administration activity done on the servers such as setting permissions/re-writing permissions, opening property sheets within Exchange System Manager, Viewing properties sheets of OU objects/group policies, etc. All of these tasks take a long period of time to complete or display. >From the client end we see hanging connections - one moment a share is >available, the next permission is denied or the connection can't be >made. Opening files from the network sluggish and at times dhcp >settings are lost. We have 2 offices: Our HQ is in office A Our Datacenter is in office B Office A has 1 Windows 2000 Server and was the first server built in the Forest. This server is doing File/Print, DHCP, WINS, DNS for it's location among doing it's specialized tasks for the domain. Office B has 9 Windows 2000 Servers - among those 9 is a DC, 1 is an E2K server and 1 is an ISA server. The DC provides file/print, DHCP, WINS, DNS for it's location. The E2K server is the mail server for both locations and the ISA server is the Firewall for both locations. Office A is connected to Office B via 256kbps Split T1 used for both voice and data. Office B is connected to the internet via full T1 which is responsible for handling all internet requests. Both sites, office A and B, belong to the same parent domain - company.com with each client's dns set as clientname.company.com First questions: Are there any flaws with the above design? The most noticeable thing to me is that Office A and B communicate of a 256kbps shared line. I'm not an expert with AD, in fact, It's new to me but from what I understand anything done in Office B has to go to the Head Server in Office A. These is where I believe my problems lie. What I would like to do is break these two sites apart and have officeA.company.com and officeB.company.com - I think this is the correct approach but I'm not sure. My main concern is our Exchange 2000 Server and out ISA server because they're both linked heavily into the AD so totally redoing the design is a bit tough. Alternatively, I have started entertaining the idea of moving the server in Office A to the Office B location making Office B the root domain and any new sites child domains. I apologize for the length and if I've confused anyone - I'm confused myself. I just want to know if I'm blaming the symptoms on the right thing and how I should proceed. Thanks, Casey List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
