Active Directory Disaster Recovery

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #598396 in Books
* Published on: 2008-06-20
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 252 pages

Customer Reviews

Insightful and Useful5
Rommel's book is filled with useful information, presented in an easily accessible format, that could be critical to a business at the worst possible time...highly recommended.

Packed with usable information4
In "Active Directory Disaster Recovery" Author Florian Rommel has created very readable, and usable title devoted to one of the least understood aspects of Microsoft's Active Directory technology. In a familiar and easily readable style, Mr. Rommel presents aspects of a widely used technology that is all to often overlooked even in large companies with competent staff.
Full of practical information and solutions to what can sometimes be very esoteric and difficult to understand concepts you will find yourself returning multiple times to this book to refresh your memory before planning for and testing your disaster recovery plans.
With active directory digging deeper and deeper everyday into the core of every business and data center, this is the information you need to know in order to assure the long term viability of your infrastructure.

Lots of seasoning required...3
A good topic for a book, and this one promises a lot, but read it with at least a few grains of salt while you test, test, test. I'm unsure how this book made it past the editorial reviewers, as the prose is often awkward and dense, with many unnecessary words and rarely flows. The often informal and inexact sentence structure loses the reader when the author attempts to describe more complicated concepts.

The book's first 100 pages are spent going briefly through AD basics (which leaves something to be desired) and making a case for a business continuity plan for AD. I feel the latter is completely unnecessary. I think it would be safe to assume the reader already knows the importance of a disaster recovery plan if they've bothered reading this book in the first place.

There is one glaring conceptual mistake in the book that I cannot let pass concerning sites and services, especially after the author makes statement: "This is the section where a lot of administrators get confused and it is also the section that, if poorly implemented, can cause extremely high network traffic generated by excessive replication."

Unfortunately the author seems to be one of these administrators as he writes on page 86 about setting site replication schedules that:

"The schedule per site actually only allows you to specify how many times per hour and during which window the replications can occur from the site. This does not affect the intra-site replications, which is the replication between the DCs located in the same site."

The section continues with screen shots and text describing how the NTDS Site Settings object under each site affects the way intersite replication takes place. This is completely wrong, as described by Microsoft (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755994.aspx):

"Intrasite connections inherit a default schedule from the schedule attribute of the NTDS Site Settings object. By default, this schedule is always available and has an interval of one hour."

By default, intrasite replication happens whenever there are changes, or if there haven't been any in a period of an hour, it will replicate once anyway. Intrasite replication is what the schedule on the NTDS Site Settings object controls.