The Best Damn Windows Server 2003 Book Period- P59:The latest incarnation of Microsoft’s server product,Windows Server 2003, brings many new features and improvements that make the network administrator’s job chapter will briefly summarize what’s new in 2003 and introduce you to the four members of the Windows Server 2003 family: the Web Edition, the Standard Edition, the Enterprise Edition, and the Datacenter Edition. | 546 Chapter 16 Working with Global Catalog Servers and Schema Figure General Tab of NTDS Settings Properties The check box on the General tab is used to enable or disable GC functionality. To be able to change the state of the GC check box you must be a member of the Domain Admins group or the Enterprise Admins group. As stated previously the planning of GC server placement is important for a successful network. Each GC server creates additional replication traffic on the network. Understanding GC Replication You know now that GC servers hold information for all of the objects in their own domains and a partial copy of the objects from other domains in the forest through replication. The default attributes included in the GC make up the most commonly searched for items. These items are part of normal Active Directory replication. The Knowledge Consistency Checker KCC generates the GC replication topology. The GC is only replicated between DCs that are GC servers the information is not replicated to other DCs. A few things can affect replication for example Universal Group membership and the number of attributes included in the GC. Universal Group Membership The GC holds the sole responsibility of maintaining Universal Group membership. The names of the Global Groups and Domain Local Groups are also in the GC but their membership lists are not. This helps keep the size of the database small enough to efficiently answer queries. For replication purposes it is best to keep Universal Group membership relatively static. Every change made to a Universal Group is replicated to every GC server. Keeping these changes to a minimum will keep the GC replication traffic to a minimum. Working with Global Catalog Servers and Schema Chapter 16 547 Attributes in GC When you first set up Active Directory there is a series of default attributes from Active Directory in the GC. Sometimes the default set of attributes is missing an item you would like to see. For example perhaps .
