DC Conectivity Question

[spi200]

Hi all

How long could a branch office 2003 Domain controller function correctly without contacting its partners in other branches. Think of it as disaster prep, assume an office DC is left stranded for a few hours, a day or at worst a week or two, what would be the issues.
I herd a term called "orphaned", but does this apply to DC's.
Management has canned our redundant link between our Disaster sites and I need some ammo to try justify why we need a link in the event of our main site failure. Even if we had dial on demand service would atleast allow our remote DC gets its updates etc.
In my opinion if your going to have Disaster Recovery Site then it better work when you need it.

Thanks

David

 

[markdmac]

Well, you will get a bunch of replication errors and of course some users could then find themselves with out of sync passwords and not be able to log on.

The worst part of your situation is that the FSMO roles will get hosed up. Particularly the RID master. If the remote DC cannot contact the RID master and has no more RIDs to assign, then you won't be able to add users or computers at your remote site.

Seizing the RID master role will resolve this, however you will then have to contend with returning the role when connectivity is restored.

Of course if you did need to implement DR plans, they probably already incluse seizing all 5 roles anyway.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

Check out my scripting solutions at

http://www.thespidersparlor.com/vbscript

 

[spi200]

Thanks Mark


That's great info about the RID master. The FSMO roles would be seized to another DRS site so we would need conectiivty to this site for our DC, excellent work.
This has all come about after the merging of two campnies which both have disaster recover sites (DRS), we need to consider the integration of these two DRS sites. Hence why I need conectivity between my DRS sites in case of primary site failure.


Thanks

David