Chapter 19. Troubleshooting your AD
Wouldn’t life be wonderful if you could set things up and they just ran without problems? In reality, things go wrong and you have to fix them. And troubleshooting, unfortunately, is a never-ending part of the administrator’s role. Even after 25 years in IT, I still spend part of every week troubleshooting. Sometimes they’re my problems, and sometimes I’m helping someone else troubleshoot their problems. Troubleshooting, like the tides, will always be with us.
This is your second round of troubleshooting in this book. The reason for leaving it until nearly the end is that you needed to learn the facets of Active Directory covered in parts 2 and 3. This chapter will cover a number of troubleshooting situations: user problems, computer-related problems, and replication problems. In some cases, the answer is contained in one of the earlier chapters; therefore, you’ll be referred to the relevant chapter rather than repeating the information here.
Tip
It can sometimes be difficult to categorize problems. The divisions I’ve used in this chapter give a sensible structure to the chapter. You’ll notice there’s significant overlap in the use of the techniques—for instance, a computer-related test can also be used in troubleshooting what is apparently a user-related problem. Your troubleshooting techniques need to span all scenarios.