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Excellent post.
I just wanted to jump in and reemphasize that
point.
Restoring a single domain of a forest in an isolated
environment and expecting it to work is unrealistic. I agree with Guido in that
you never should have been given admin rights into a domain of someone else's
forest. You should have had OU privileges or just had your own forest entirely.
-------------
>>Ad is supposed to be a enterprise
directory where most enterprises span the globe and have multiple sister corps
or corps they've merged with or aquired. these corps have thier own domains and
IT depts.<<
That's not how AD is supposed to be - that's merely how
you'd like to use it. Not necessarily the same. I agree that some
companies may implement it this way especially in the early days of AD, but not
after they understood that not the domain, but the forest is the security
boundary.
If you have no good working relationship with your mother
corp and they're not really too fond of you either, they should have never
offered you your own domain. You would have been a perfect candidate for a
separate forest. However, if they still wanted to fully integrate you into their
forest without trusting you to perform service-level operations (i.e. task that
require domain admin privileges), they would have merely required to grant you
management of one or a few OUs.
If you like it or not, recovery of AD - in case of the
disaster you describe, or in other disasters that go more towards deletion of
objects - is an forest level task that usually requires enterprise admin
privileges. I am not saying, that I don't think it would be nice if this
wasn't the case, but once you learn to treat a domain as an integral part of a
forest that should not be managed by a separate team of administrators, it
doesn't make a difference.
/Guido
going to AD was something decided by the higher ups to merge my corp and
our sister corp into a smealess whole. The sister corp already had AD in place
and they own the root. our IT depts. don't exactly communicate or relate to each
other very well :)
i'm sure its like that in alot of places. before comming here, I was in a
Netware 6.0 enviorment and feel that directory is much more mature in terms of
configurabilty and satisfying all the business needs that AD does.
i exagerrated when i said i would move from AD to NDS.
its just that when my corp wants to do DR testing for our domain and we go
away to the dr site and want to recreate most of our infrastructure from back
up, etc, its fursttrating to have to go to our sister corp IT dept and ask them
for the Domain admin or enterpris admin password or a copy of thier root role
holding master dc on a laptop or vmware just to practise recovery of our domain
and exchange2k.
it seems MS made it so you can't recover a child domain without
connectivity to the root. that kinda stinks.
i can understand losing some functionality but still be up and running.
however to make it impossible to get up at all without the root fsmo dc is I
think something that needs to be addressed.
in MS's mind, all thier DR whitepapers assume you either lost a dc or 2 and
want to recover them OR you lost the entire forest. they really don't address
losing a child domain.
Ad is supposed to be a enterprise directory where most enterprises span the
globe and have multiple sister corps or corps they've merged with or aquired.
these corps have thier own domains and IT depts. If one corp goes down, in MS's
implementation, this corp has to get in touch with the IT dept of the root, be
allowed high access to the forest OR have someone from that other IT dept free
enough to come down for security reasons and log in himself as enterprise admin.
also some physical connectivity is implied...
All in the middel of a disaster OR just to test and practice for said
disaster.
thats asking for alot of any large company.
MS should know how unrealistic this is more than anyone.
my pointless two cents.
thanks for reading and replying before
-----Original Message-----
From: Mulnick, Al
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thu 3/25/2004 10:20 AM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Cc:
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] disaster recovery
Just out of curiousity, why did you deploy a forest root
structure? Why didn't you go with a single domain
structure?
Otherwise, Who manages the schema without the root?
Who manages the domain naming master in your environment (both are at the
root, right?) Who handles your time synch? Who holds the Enterprise
Administrator permissions?
"Important: Backup data from a DC can
only be used to restore that DC. You cannot use a backup of one DC to restore
another. To have your environment completely backed up, you would need to have
a backup of every domain controller. This should be kept in mind while
developing your backup strategy. The minimum requirement should be to backup
all the OM role holders and GCs. Also the first domain controller in the root
domain should always be backed up."
"Note:
Because this procedure requires modifying the configuration naming context, it
requires Enterprise Administrator permissions."
Switching to
something that works for you is certainly an understandable path to take but
only if you understand that product better AND it solves your issues. IT
is not about technology for technology sake it's about solving your business
issues. If you need something else to make that happen, I'd be the first
to tell you to go do it.
This thread comes across as sticker shock as you go
to do this. This is also why you want to practice this stuff all
the time; that way you are not surprised at 0200 when everything is
down.
Al
i don't need the schema or domain naming roles to restore my domain. i
have all the other roles.
yet it still has issues with finding a gc or replicating within a
domain.
why?
this is a fundemental design flaw of AD. It boggles the mind. If in a
real disaster or even a test, MS expects you to have connectivity to
your root domain wherever it may be(on the other side of the world) AND access
to that domains Admin passwords or accounts OR enterprise admin just to get up
and running, then they are clearly not living in this world.
AD was meant for the enterprise where a corp could have offices and
domains all over the world. if in the event of disaster, we have to worry
about isdn or T1 lines to the root and overcome all the politics of diff IT
depts and security to beg for the enterprise password(even just for a simple
test) JUST to get functional(not add or delete domains or modify the schema),
then i'm ready to ditch AD for NDS or something more realistic.
what other reason could I have to connect to the root? what other secrets
does it hold aside from the 2 roles?
does anyone know?
why doesn't MS tell you these things in their DR documentation? is it so
obivious?
why is connectivity to the root never mentioned as key?
am i the idiot?
i'm willing to accept that, but what else does the root dc hold in terms
of AD functionality?
thank you for all your help so far.
-----Original Message-----
From: Mulnick, Al
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wed 3/24/2004 4:28 PM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Cc:
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] disaster recovery
No, you need the root domain as it holds some of the
roles etc.
In order for this to work, you need to restore the root
domain as well. I've found that doing this with a virtual server is
sometimes easier but that just saves on hardware
requirements.
Al
yes.
a quick question- can one restore an entire child domain without
connectivity to the root domain?
-----Original Message-----
From: Anderson
Santos Patricio [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wed
3/24/2004 2:58 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc:
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] disaster
recovery
You Zones is setting for Dynamic Updates =
YES???
restarting netlogon or registerdns does not work.
where is this copy of the root zone in my dns server. i don't think i
have it by default. i had to transfer it on my dns server back home.
also if i had it, wouldnt creating a AD intergrated dns server on my
test DC also have it?
finally, when dc's replicate, do they look each other up in a
gc?
i never had any gc srv records in my local domain zone, only in the
root. is this normal?
thanks for your reply
-----Original Message-----
From: Anderson
Santos Patricio [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Wed
3/24/2004 2:16 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc:
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] disaster
recovery
Hi Tom,
All register of AD Zones can recover with two
comand:
restart netlogon service or ipconfig
/registerdns
and all workstation will update your register in
dns, or dhcp will ..
In Windows 2000 is interesting you have a secondary
zone of your root in your local dns server,
In Windows 2003 you can set dns zone to level
Forest then this zone is replicated for all domain controller in the
forest.
Thanks for advanced.
Anderson
Patricio - Analista de Suporte
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer on
2003/2000
Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator on
2003/2000
Red Hat Certified Technician
i also get a "all gc's are down" error.
gc records are just registered in the root domain, i assume. i only
have a dns for my domain.
also dcdiag output says "the server is not responding to directory
service requests" though it holds a copy of AD.
how can i get around this? do i need a copy of the root dns zone?
how can i get this? can i export it to a text file and import it into my
dns server? can i somehow pull it from the config container in AD
without being connected to the root of the tree?
is this the cause of my woes?
it would be insane on MS's part to demand connectivity to the root
of the forest when restoring or doing DR on AD.
what did i screw up?
Thanks again for any help
-----Original Message-----
From: Kern,
Tom
Sent: Wed 3/24/2004 1:34 PM
To:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc:
Subject:
[ActiveDir] disaster recovery
I just restored AD. I had a test laptop, pulled it off
the network, ran ntdsutil, seized all 3 roles,ran metadata cleanup and
removed all my old dc's. deleted them with adsiedit and all dns
records as well.
then at the DR site, i set up new servers with the
same names as the old one's, ran dcpromo. however, the new servers get
dnslookup/rpc errors when i try to force a replication.
also, they fail a dcdiag because the guid dns name is
not present and the server "fails a directory request"
Also the srv records for kerberos and kpasswd do not
appear in dns for my domain.
The test laptop
had an AD intergrated dns zone pulled directly from my real network.
However, it just has the zone for my domain, not the forest
root.
do i need this record as well to promote DC's. I'm not
connected to the forest anyway, but should i have the forest root
records too.
what am i doing wrong?
thanks
.+wYØP×.+j
joryIV+v*
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