Suppose you've added a new DC named w2k3.bigfirm.biz to your domain. How do you place its SRV records into the DNS zone? You don't typically need to worry about that process because the Netlogon service rewrites a DC's SRV records every time the Netlogon service starts up. Therefore, you could use the following command to force any Windows 2003 or Win2K DC to put its SRV records into the domain's DNS zone:
net stop netlogon & net start netlogon
The ampersand (&) in that command lets you place two or more commands on one line.
As a quicker alternative to Netlogon, a Windows 2003 system in the bigfirm.biz domain can use the following Nltest command to recreate its SRV records:
nltest /server:names.bigfirm.biz /dsregdns
In this case, you can't specify a DC's name. Clearly, Microsoft wants you to run this Nltest variation only on the DC itself. And keep in mind that the Win2K Server version of Nltest doesn't let you use the /dsregdns option, although it does let you use the /dsderegdns option. (And don't bother trying to copy a more recent version of Nltest to a Win2K system; it will refuse to run.)
You might find two more Nltest options useful. One new challenge that AD introduces is the existence of sites. For this challenge, Nltest offers the /dsgetsite option. To determine what site a DC lives in, you can use this command:
nltest /server:<servername> /dsgetsite
where servername is the name of the DC whose location you want to determine. You can use the short machine name (e.g., dc1) or the complete DNS name (e.g., dc1.bigfirm.biz), and you don't need backslashes. If you don't specify a server name, Nltest assumes you want site information about the local system.
Knowing which site a server lives in is useful, but some sites don't have a DC. In that case, nearby DCs cover for the site. But which DCs? You can use the /dsgetsitecov option to find out:
nltest /server:<servername> /dsgetsitecov
I'd like to see Nltest work the other way too, so I could feed it a site and obtain the names of all the DCs that cover that site. Perhaps we'll see that functionality in the Longhorn version.
End of Article
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