SysAdmin Talk

When you configure the first Domain Controller for your organization using the Active Directory Installation Wizard (or dcpromo for short), it is configured with all five FSMO roles by default. Here I will cover how you can view and transfer the specific FSMO roles of various Domain Controllers in your domain. As this is a short how-to article, I won’t go into the specific details of when you would need to transfer roles, but in short you may want to take a certain domain controller down for maintenance one day and may find it necessary to transfer some, or all of these roles.

To start with you will obviously require more than one Domain Controller in your Windows domain. In my case I have a “Primary” and “Secondary” domain controller called “NOOBS-DC1″ and “NOOBS-DC2″.

I just about tore my hair out the other night trying to find the right equipment to connect up to a small Cisco 1721 router. I wanted to get the afore mentioned router configured for some training I was doing. The problem of course being that I lacked a PC with any COM ports to connect the Cisco console cable up to. Just to think a few years ago I had rejoiced when motherboard manufacturers ceased supplying COM ports on their boards and replaced them with extra USB ports.

One of the questions I get on a regular basis is how to move the database file and the log files to a different location.

First of all, it is a best practice to change the database and log files location. By default they are configured to use c:\program files\microsoft\exchange server\mailbox\first storage group (in Exchange Server 2007). Change this to a separate physical disk, and if possible two separate physical disks, one for the database file and one for the log files. If one of these two disks fails you have a much better recovery scenario then when the database and the log files are located on one physical disk. Also from a performance point of view it’s better to use two separate physical disks.