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Now, this may prevent people from logging on,

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depending upon the FSMO role situation on this domain controller.

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So even though we don't have to down the entire server to

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boot into Directory Services Restore Mode,

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I just don't want to underestimate the potential

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impact of even restartable AD DS,

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particularly when it comes to DNS and FSMO roles,

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as well as any other functions that your domain controller is offering.

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Okay?

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Okay, so now that we've gotten this far,

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let me clear the screen,

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and let's do an ntdsutil to enter the ntdsutil environment.

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It's an interactive tool.

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We'll do activate instance ntds,

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and then we'll shift to the file maintenance context,

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and I'm going to do a compaction.

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Actually, I just realized that I didn't create a folder for it,

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so let me just try compact to ctmp.

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Oh, good.

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I wasn't sure if there was a tmp folder.

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So what happened here?

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Well, the Active Directory database, as you can see,

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is actually a file called ntds.dit.

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Its under C:\Windows\NTDS.

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And when you do an offline compaction,

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you're basically creating another copy of the directory.

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So in a very large environment, you want to make sure,

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you have to make sure, actually,

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that your compact to destination has enough free space to

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accommodate another copy of that directory,

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which mine does because it's tiny.

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Now it says down below that Compaction was successful.

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We need to do a copy statement here and then delete because that compacted

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copy of the file still exists under c:\tmp\ntds.dit.

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So let me take care of that now, copy c:\tmp\ntds.dit,

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and we're copying it to C:\Windows\NTDS.

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Actually, instead of just the DIT file,

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I like the help that Microsoft has given us here because there are some

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other files besides just the DIT file that are dependencies.

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So notice that I'm doing c:\tmp\ntds.* to pick up all of the extensions

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and then the to destination is going to be Windows\NTDS.

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It didn't like that.

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Maybe it was the quotes.

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Let me try that one more time, ntds.*, and then we'll do C:\Windows\NTDS".

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Huh?

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Oh.

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Okay, I think I know what the problem is.

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I'm still in NTDS, so let me exit, or quit,

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there we go, and then exit, quit, a couple of quits,

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here we go, copy,

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or let me actually see if I can get to command history with my up‑arrow.

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No, I can't, unfortunately.

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So, I'm going to do this one more time with feeling,

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copy :\tmp\ntds.*, I shouldn't need quotes because I don't have spaces here,

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NTDS, great, and then we've got delete.

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I'm going to skip the del statement,

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but that's just cleaning up any residual old log files.

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Now, at this point, it's critical to know that we're not finished.

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The AD DS database has stopped, so we're going to need to finish with a Flourish by doing a net start