3/22/08

More research

I tried 70-297 on the 15th & flopped again! Today, I'm doing some study on related topics.

Server 2003 (Standard) minimum system requirements are a 133MHz x86 CPU, 128MB of RAM, and 2.0 GB of available HD space. Server 2003 supports three processor architectures: x86 32-bit, x86 64-bit, and Itanium. This means that Server 2003 does NOT run on RISC processors.

To bone up on RADIUS, I followed instructions to install IAS and configure RRAS to use it. It worked! I ran IAS and RRAS on the same server.

Operations masters - it seems I'm weak on these. They used to be called FSMO (fiz-mo) for Flexible Single Master Operation. The concept of Active Directory is a "multi-master" one overall, but there are some roles that only a single DC handles. Two of these are at the forest level: schema master and domain naming master. Three others are at the per-domain level: RID master (sort of the "master domain controller" - it allocates domain RIDs to the DCs for use in SIDs); Infrastructure Master (only important in multidomain environments - in which case it shouldn't be on a GC server); and the PDC Emulator, which handles password changes and account lock-outs. It's also the authoritative time source in a domain.

I think if I bandwidth isn't an issue, every DC in a small domain should be a GC.

For a short-term disaster recovery simulation, you only need a PDCe available. However, if you restore a DC from backup, it will invalidate its RID pool and need access to a RID master to replenish it for new object creation. See here and here.

When you install a Server 2003 box in a Windows 2000 forest, you have to update the 2000 AD schema for the new features in 2003's version of Active Directory. You do this by running adprep /forestprep on your forest's schema master & adprep /domainprep on each domain's infrastructure master.

In other news, SP1 for Vista was released on the 18th.