Troubleshooting Lab

By Author: Henry Brown
Total Articles: 59
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You are a network administrator for Contoso Pharmaceuticals. You were recently on vacation for a week, and during your absence, two people were assigned to handle your daily tasks. One of those tasks was to create an OU named Accounting. Due to a communications error, both people performed this task. Each did so at a different domain controller. When you return to work, you are told about the situation and then shown what they believe to be corrupted data in the Active Directory database. They need your help to figure out what happened and determine what to do about it.
In order to see this issue, you must first create the problem. To do so, complete the fol?lowing steps-.
1.Unplug the network cable from the network card of Server2 to ensure that the
servers are not able to replicate while you complete these steps.
2.Log on to Serverl using the domain administrator's user name and password.
3.Open the Active Directory Users And Computers console.
4.Create a new OU named Accounting in the contoso.com domain.
5.Once you see the Accounting OU in contoso.com, unplug the network cable from the IT Exams ...
... interface card of Serverl. Reconnect the network cable that you removed from Server2. The network cable of Serverl should be unplugged and the network cable of Server2 should be connected.
6.Log on to Server2 using the domain administrator's user name and password.
7.Open the Active Directory Users And Computers console. This will take awhile, so
be patient.
8.You'll see an error indicating that naming information cannot be located. Click
OK. The Active Directory Users And Computers console opens.
9.Right-click the Active Directory Users And Computers object in the console. Then click Connect To Domain Controller.
10. Type Server2 into the Enter The Name Of Another Domain Controller text box and click OK. Click Yes to confirm that you'd like to make this connection. It will take a few moments to make the connection.
Off the Record If you ever see an error when initializing a domain management console, you should investigate the reason for the error. You should also make arrangements to ensure that no two administrators attempt to perform the same administrative tasks at different sites (that is, on different domain controllers). Otherwise, problems might occur that are n difficult to correct. For example, two administrators moving the same server object in Active Directory free Cisco question papers and Services, but from two different geographical locations, are likely to cause a problem that would require Ntdsutil and Metadata cleanup. You learned about Metadata cleanup in Chapter 3.
11.Click Refresh or press the F5 key after about 60 seconds and you should see the
contoso.com domain load.
12.Create an OU named Accounting. Although the console will run a bit slower, you should be able to perform this task. This is a different Accounting OU than you just created on Serverl. You will see this once the two servers have synchronized.
13.Once the Accounting OU has been created, insert the network cable of Serverl.Now both Serverl and Server2 will replicate. Wait a couple of minutes.
14.Return to Serverl. Close and then reopen the Active Directory Users And Computers console. You should see two new OUs: one named Accounting and the other named Accounting with some additional characters, including a box and the letters CNF followed by a colon and 32 hexadecimal digits.
This is what happens when two administrators create objects -with the same name at two different locations. This is not corrupted data, but rather a data collision. Two Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) objects cannot have the same names in the directory structure, so Active Directory has renamed the object created last with a name that won't conflict with the object created first. You may simply delete the object with the really long name. Of course, if the object with the really long name contained CompTIA Nerwork+ Certification that were supposed to be part of your domain, you'd first move those resources to the appropriate containers.
Note Although you caused the replication delay by unplugging the domain controllers, you'd typically find replication delays in environments utilizing sites. The default replication interval of 180 minutes and the potential for a replication schedule that prevents servers from repli?cating immediately make such issues more likely to occur.