Troubleshooting Status of Primary Domain Controller (PDC)
If there are no domain controllers in the domain available, you cannot edit Group Policy. If your primary domain controller (PDC) is down you will be given a choice to use a different domain controller to edit your policies. Be aware that if you choose this option, you may see a delay between the time that an object (such as an organizational unit or Group Policy object) is created and the time that you can actually add a new policy to a newly created container or edit a newly created GPO. This occurs due to the fact that you may now be communicating with multiple domain controllers during the edit session. In this case, waiting for replication or forcing replication will take care of this problem.
To troubleshoot PDC status, you can use the following command-line tools, available on the Windows 2000 Server compact disc in the \SUPPORT\TOOLS folder:
NLTEST.exe. Provides multiple options to list all domain controllers or just the existing PDC. If no PDC is available it returns an error. In addition, NLTEST helps perform network administrative tasks such as:
Forcing a shutdown.
Querying and checking on the status of trust.
Testing trust relationships and the state of domain controller replication in a Windows domain.
Forcing a user-account database into sync on Windows NT 4.0 or earlier domain controllers. (Windows 2000 domain controllers use a completely different mechanism for maintaining user accounts.)
NTDSUTIL.exe. Shows who owns the PDC role. NTDSUTIL performs database maintenance of the Active Directory store, management and control of the Flexible Single Master Operations (FSM0), and cleaning up of metadata left behind by abandoned domain controllers, those which are removed from the network without being uninstalled. The NTDSUTIL command-line utility can be run from the command prompt. Help for the NTDSUTIL utility can also be found at the command prompt by typing ntdsutil /?.
|
