alternate dc

[Guest]

here is our setup...

We have 6 offices each 20 blocks away from each other.

out of the 6 offices 5 of them each has on DC which has the following roles:

DHCP, AD-DNS, File Sharing, Global Catalog

the last office is where i am located which is head Quarters..

we have 2 DCs...

One is just a simple DC with file sharing

the other is:

the Root DC with all 5 FSMO roles, win 2000 Exchange, Global Catalog, DNS.

We are currently upgrading to ex 2003 and we ran the adprep / forest and
domain prep al ready...

any help would be greatly welcomed...



My question is:

If God forbid the one and only Dc at an office goes down how can the users
still be able to broswe the web...

In the past i was informed that in order for a client to browse the web when
that Dc at that site goes down.. they had to manually set an ip on the
client's machine...

Tey did not told me that the Dc had DHCP with the scope options set to point
to the Dc for dns queries and the site's router as the default gateway...

thanks in advance...

 

[Paul Bergson]

The problem has nothing to do with your DC it is your dhcp server. If it
goes down though you have time to recover, Your dhcp server provides ip
addresses to its clients, the clients need to renew these lease periods if
they don't they expire after the extent of the lease has expired, by default
I believe it is 8 days. The client doesn;t wait the full 8 days but
attempts to renew after half its life is up and contiues to renew until its
drop dead day. So at work if you went by the deafult lease period you would
have four days before you started to run into problems and by then you
should have been able to either bring up a new dhcp server or recover the
old one.

Now on to the DNS server, hopefully all your clients point to multiple dns
servers so in the event one goes down the client has access to a backup, if
that is the case your clients should be able to live happily and they can
continue to access the web and download spyware, adware, etc... and provide
job security for you.

Hope this helps.

--
Paul Bergson MCT, MCSE, MCSA, Security+, CNE, CNA, CCA
http://www.pbbergs.com

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