I have come across Administrators who have barely managed to get the DC up and running and with no further checks rushed into installing Exchange and have had loads of problems and start looking for solutions on Exchange as opposed to get the roots right i.e. DC / DNS.

Without further delay while some of you are getting bored lets see how we can verify our installation.

1. Click Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Active Directory Users & computers.
OR
Click Start > Run > dsa.msc



2. Click Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Active Directory Sites & Services
OR
Click Start > Run > dssite.msc



3. Click Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > DNS
OR
Click Start > Run > dnsmgmt.msc



4. Navigate to C:\WINDOWS\NTDS
Note: In my previous article I opted to install AD in the default location.




As you can see, the log files & the AD database ( NTDS.DIT ) have been created & are located on the C: drive.

NTDS.DIT is the actual database which contains the Active Directory database. This contains all the information stored in AD i.e. User Accounts, groups etc..

EDB.CHK is a checkpoint file that points to the location of the last committed checkpoint in the log file. The EDB.LOG file is always the name of the current log file and is for the NTDS.DIT transactions.

RES1.LOG and RES2.LOG are reserve log files used only when the drive containing the log files is full i.e. in our scenario c:\ is running out of disk space.

Note: that each log file is always 10M in size.

5. Navigate to C:\WINDOWS\SYSVOL
Note: This is the default location which I have used in my demo i.e. my previous article. You need to refer to the location you have selected while running the dcpromo wizard.



Note: In the above screen shot you see two folders with some unique names. These are actually the two default policies you create at the time of AD creation i.e. dcpromo. The policies are:

a) Default Domain Policy
b) Default Domain controllers Policy

It is highly recommended NOT to make any changes to these "default policies" and create NEW policies and edit and tweak the settings according to your requirements & to your hearts content. :)

The above mentioned steps are only some of the quick basic checks you can perform to verify your AD installation. You can also use NETDIAG / DCDIAG which I will try to cover in upcoming articles.