FSMO ROLES

One of the most asked interview question is the FSMO roles. I remember in ach interview I walk into last coupe year I have asked every single time the FSMO roles. Operation masters no doughty is very important and curtail for every MCSE to understand and use it whenever is needed. I have already blogged about FSMO roles, why we needed them and how to keep memorize this role. I most offend ask to my students following question about FSMO roles.

If you have 12 Domain, and considering one Forest how many FSMO roles in total exist? I get multiple answers including 1 and 12 domains. Of course those of you understand would say 38 domains without thinking a second. Knowing FSMO roles are very important, indentifying these roles in AD (Active directory) is fairly easy. The Domain wide FSMO roles can be easily seen from ADUC (active directory users and computer, which are

• RID
  
• PDC
  
• Infrastructure
  

The Forest ones can be seen with multiple utilities, such as NetDom

C:\>netdom query fsmo

Schema owner nhqdtcdc1.ri.SMTP25.org

Domain role owner nhqdtcdc1.ri.SMTP25.org

PDC role nhqdtcdc4.archq.ri.SMTP25.org

RID pool manager nhqdtcdc4.archq.ri.SMTP25.org

Infrastructure owner nhqdtcdc3.archq.ri.SMTP25.org

The command completed successfully.

Other command question I have seen is related the AD maintenance

Ntdsutil

Authoritative restore	Authoritatively restore the DIT database
Configurable Settings	Manage configurable settings
Domain management	Prepare for new domain creation
Files	Manage NTDS database files
Help	Show this help information
LDAP policies	Manage LDAP protocol policies
Metadata cleanup	Clean up objects of decommissioned servers
Popups %s	(en/dis)able popups with "on" or "off"
Quit	Quit the utility
Roles	Manage NTDS role owner tokens
Security account management	Manage Security Account Database	Duplicate SID Cleanup
Semantic database analysis	Semantic Checker
Set DSRM Password	Reset directory service restore mode administrator account password

• Ntdsutil.exe is a command-line tool that provides management facilities for Active Directory.
  
• Seize FSMO roles using Ntdsutil.exe
  
• The partition for each FSMO role is in the following list:
  

FSMO role	Partition
Schema	CN=Schema,CN=configuration,DC=<forest root domain>
Domain Naming Master	CN=configuration,DC=<forest root domain>
PDC	DC=<domain>
RID	DC=<domain>
Infrastructure	DC=<domain>

Directory Services Restore Mode
Regards
Oz ozugurlu