The Best Damn Windows Server 2003 Book Period- P70: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. | 656 Chapter 19 Ensuring Active Directory Availability Using the esentutl Command Although all of the operations covered previously in this section used the Ntdsutil command-line utility most actually performed their work by calling the Esentutl command. ESENT Extensible Storage Engine for NT is one of the acronyms used to refer to the ESE database system that Active Directory uses. The Esentutl command is the maintenance command that is associated with this database system. Because Microsoft prefers that you use the Ntdsutil command for all low-level database maintenance operations they built calls to most of the major Esentutl operations into it. However you do not have to use Ntdsutil to perform these following are two of the commands from earlier in the chapter with their associated Esentutl command-line arguments Integrity SYSTEMROOT System32 g C Windows NTDS o Recover SYSTEMROOT System32 redb l C Windows NTDS s C WINNT NTDS 8 o The command used in conjunction with the p switch shown in Figure is considered the most dangerous of all the low-level database commands. In Windows 2000 this command was available as the repair option in Ntdsutil and has been removed in the version of Ntdsutil that ships with Windows Server 2003. This option performs a very low-level and highly invasive binary database repair operation. It is very likely that you will lose some data when using this option and it is highly possible that it will be data essential to your Active Directory database. You should use this command with the p switch only when you have been advised to do so by Microsoft support personnel or when you feel that you have tried everything else to get Active Directory to initialize. Always make a backup of your database file before you run this utility. In most cases you will be resorting to this option when Active Directory can no longer initialize and you will be booted to Directory Services .
