The other important thing to remember when localising traffic is to ensure
that there's a local (to the site) DNS server that the local clients point
to (not an absolute need, but 99.9% recommended).
This DC should obviously be a GC too.
There is a way to kind of force preference to one DC over another, but I
won't go into that. Correctly configuring AD Sites (and DNS) will do this
for you ;-)
--
Paul Williams
http://www.msresource.net/
http://forums.msresource.net/
Ashraf said:
I have a remote site that has local DC in that site and I would like to force
all the W2K clients in that site to authenticate to that DC
You cannot directly do that, and should not try, but....
when they login
to the domain in the morning. Can someone tell me if there is a way or
not.
You can and should ENCOURAGE the clients to use the
local DC which they will if you setup your SITES in
AD Sites and Services.
Clients on a site (an IP among the site's subnets) will
strongly prefer a local DC but attempt to find another
when that one is down, even if they must go offsite.
Do you have your OWN sites defined?
Go into AD Sites and Services.
1) Create the new SITE.
2) Optionally Rename the default first site to
indicate the real name of your main location.
3) Create a SUBNET (or subnets) for each location
and assign each to the proper site
4) Create a SITE LINK from each site to at least one
other site so that all sites are interconnected either
directly or indirectly but so there are no islands
that cannot reach the rest of the sites.
Optionally adjust:
a) Schedule (hours when replication is permitted)
b) Frequency (how often DC can replicate across site links)
c) Cost (only relevant if you have more than one site link
and really only if you have multiple pathways for
replication.)
(Let it all replicate).
5) Move the remote DC to it's proper site
(you might run DCDiag on the moved DC to see if it has
updated DNS correctly -- or even stop/start the NetLogon
service on that DC to remind it to re-register with DNS --
if everything goes right, it will list itself in the proper
_SiteName subdomains in your DNS .)
After this whole think replicates, you will find that local
clients will prefer the "own" local DC in the same site.