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Let’s begin with some background on how the
employee profiles (or permissions) on your Windows Network is actually set
up.
Your Windows Network is based on Active Directory technology which is a
network-wide permissions system. Let's say you have a company with a hundred
users and need to set permissions for file access, email, and the like for
all those users.
Active Directory, which came out with Windows 2000, allows
you to set those permissions once, and have the permissions propagate
throughout the network. The alternative would be to set up permissions on
each machine, for each set of users. This is complex, very time consuming,
and can often lead to errors. So this idea certainly makes sense.
Managing
the Active Directory’s database is a machine called a Domain Controller. It
runs permissions on your network. And if you lose your Domain Controller for
any reason, ie., crash or virus, you lose your network and have to rebuild
the information on that Domain Controller.
The best way to minimize network
downtime is to have at least a second domain controller, since all of your
company’s account data is stored on domain controllers. This account data
consists of your user name and passwords, permissions and, if you have a
Microsoft
Exchange Mail Server, all your mailbox information. Unfortunately simply
recreating your username and password will not retrieve your mailbox,
security settings, or profile.
To ensure that this information is always
available to you and to minimize downtime, it is recommended to have more
than one domain controller. If your primary server fails, you can retrieve
your account data from any domain controller on the network and use that
information to recover the server. The second domain controller depending on
the size of your network can simply be a beefed up workstation with Windows
Server 2003 installed.
For a small investment, having a secondary domain
controller will allow users to login to the network and access network
resources outside the failed server, which in turn helps minimize downtime
and maintains productivity
Contact Link High at
(973) 659-1350 or
sales@linkhigh.com
today and find out how you can get your redundant domain controller
setup!
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