global catalog promotion/replication?

[JA]

once i promote a domain controller to be a global catalog server, how long
does it
take before it starts to advertise itself as being a global catalog server?
this one
DC, i promoted it to GC over a month ago. when i run dcdiag, in the
advertising
test it says warning: SERVER is not advertising as a global catalog.check
that
server finished GC promotion. how does one check if GC promotion finished?

then it says check the event log on server that enough source replicas for
the
GC are available. what the heck does that mean?

 

[Matjaz Ladava [MVP]]

Wether the server is GC or not is governed by options attribute of nTDSDSA
object
located at CN=NTDS
Settings,cn=ServerName,cn=SiteName,cn=Configuration,dc=domain,dc=local
This attribute sets server as GC or not. After you mark a server as GC it
takes some time for GC to build. To see if your GC is ready you need to
query isGlobalCatalogReady in RootDSE. The following script will return this
flag

Set objRootDSE= GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE")
Wscript.Echo "Is GC ready: " & objRootDSE.Get("isGlobalCatalogReady")

If your GC is not ready, then check your event log for possible errors. Run
dcdiag and netdiag to get more info.

--
Regards

Matjaz Ladava, MCSE, MCSA, MCT, MVP
Microsoft MVP - Active Directory
(e-mail address removed), (e-mail address removed)
http://ladava.com

 

[Joe Richards [MVP]]

The time it takes to get event 1119 (GC ready) depends entirely on the

1. Setting on the advertisement reg entry
2. The time it takes to replicate the partitions from the domains.

Assuming default setting of 1 you have to have a full sync replication of
the P.A.S. for every domain partition to the GC in question to have the GC
be ready. If those messages are popping, the GC is not a GC yet because it
doesn't have the data.

As an example my GCs in my high speed connection facilities can take a day
or longer depending on how many objects we have at the moment and what
domains they are in (i.e. where does the data have to come from). GC
replication is lower priority than normal replication and can get preempted
a lot. To speed up the replication of a GC you can force the partial
partitions with forced synces through REPADMIN. Doing this I can take a GC
build that could take a day or longer to finish in 8 or so hours however the
default partition of the DC doesn't get the updates as often as it normally
would because the inbound queue gets dominated by the partition you are
forcing the replication for.

joe