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Active Directory Sites and Services is used to create sites and subnets that mirror the physical and geographical topology of your network. You can then configure how and when Active Directory replication occurs between different sites to optimize bandwidth usage over slow WAN links between sites. If your implementation of WS2003 is at one physical location only, then you may not use this tool at all. If you have multiple branch offices or subsidiaries at different locations, however, expect to use this tool, especially during the implementation stage when you are tuning network traffic over slow WAN links.
The console tree for this tool displays the sites in your enterprise and the links between them. A typical console tree looks like this:
Active Directory Sites and Services Inter-Site Transports IP Site link Site link . . . SMTP Site link Site link . . . Site Servers Server NTDS Settings Active Directory connection Active Directory connection . . . Server . . . Site . . . Subnets Subnet Subnet . . .
The three first-level containers here are:
Inter-Site Transports
This contains the various site links between your different sites, grouped together depending on whether they use RPCs or SMTP messages to replicate directory information between sites.
Sites
These are one or more containers for the various sites in your enterprise. The Default-First-Site-Name is created by default when you install your first domain controller in your forest root domain. Other sites are created using this tool to reflect the different physical or geographical locations of portions of your WS2003 network. Each site can contain one or more server objects, which are typically domain controllers. Each site also contains NTDS site settings for scheduling directory replication. Each server object contains an NTDS settings object, which represents the directory (
Ntds.dit file). This file is located on an NTFS partition on the domain controllers and contains the Active Directory connections for the domain controller.
Subnets
This contains the various subnets in your network, each of which is associated with one of your sites.
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Under the Action menu, you can select the following:
Active Directory Sites and Services node
Select this to administer a target forest or to connect to a particular domain controller in the forest, thus retrieving the information needed to display the hierarchy of sites and subnets in the enterprise.
Sites, Inter-Site Transports, or Subnets container
Select this in order to delegate authority to administer these portions of Active Directory to trusted users in your enterprise. You can also delegate individual sites or just the Servers container within a site. See
Delegation earlier in this chapter for more information on the subject of delegation.
A site
Select this to link a Group Policy Object (GPO) to that site. See
Group
Policy earlier in this chapter for more information.
A particular server within the Servers container in a site
Select this if you want to move the server to a different site.
A particular Active Directory connection in the NTDS Settings container of any domain controller
Select this to manually force directory replication to occur with that domain controller.For information on various tasks involving this tool, see
Domain
Controller earlier in this chapter and in the following section.