Recipe3.3.Determining and Specifying the DC That ESM Uses


Recipe 3.3. Determining and Specifying the DC That ESM Uses

Problem

You want to know which DC ESM is using to retrieve and display information from Active Directory, or you want to control which DC it will use.

Solution

Using a graphical user interface

To see which DC Exchange System Manager is using:

  1. Download, install, and launch Process Explorer from www.sysinternals.com.

  2. The Process Explorer window has two panes. In the top pane, on the left, there's a list of all processes running on the local machine. Expand the explorer.exe process.

  3. Expand the Explorer and you will see a process called mmc.exe and the ESM icon (see Figure 3-1).

    Figure 3-1. Process Explorer, showing the MMC process selected


  4. Double-click mmc.exe. Open the TCP/IP properties tab, as shown in Figure 3-2.

    Figure 3-2. The TCP connection from this MMC session shows the DC in use by ESM


  5. The Remote Address column will show the name of the DC that ESM is using (in this case, batman.robichaux.net).

To choose the DC that that ESM uses, do the following:

  1. On as computer that has the Exchange System Manager installed, select Start Run, then type mmc to launch the MMC application.

  2. Choose File Add/Remove Snap-in, then click the Add button.

  3. From the list of snap-ins shown in the Add Standalone Snap-in window, select Exchange System and click Add.

  4. The Change Domain Controller window will appear. By default, Any Writable Domain Controller is selected; if you want to select a specific DC, pick it from the list, then click OK.

Using a command-line interface

  1. Close all open MMC snap-ins.

  2. Launch the Exchange System Manager (Exchange System Manager.msc).

  3. Open a new command window.

  4. On the command line, type tasklist /FI "imagename eq mmc.exe" to find the process ID of the ESM process.

  5. Use the netstat command to find the corresponding process' network connections:

    > netstat-ano -p tcp | findstr "<pid>"

    where <pid> is the PID you found in step 4.

  6. The command-line output will list the source and destination IP addresses used by the TCP connections for the process you specified. The destination address is the address of the selected DC; you can use ping -a <ipAddr> to resolve it if necessary.

Discussion

ESM displays information about the Exchange organization by reading information from the configuration partition in Active Directory. You may be surprised to learn that ESM doesn't choose a DC using DSAccess, but rather on its own using ADSI serverless binding. Due to replication delays and possible problems, the information on one DC may not be entirely consistent with the information on another DC. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine which DC ESM is using from within the tool itself. This can be frustrating in situations where the information displayed by ESM does not match with what you expect and you want to know the DC name to start some troubleshooting.

The GUI method to determine the DC uses the Process Explorer tool from www.sysinternals.com. It is probably the simplest method to use. The only wrinkle we've found is if you start ESM after you've started Process Explorer, you don't see the ESM icon associated with mmc.exe. This can cause some confusion if you have more than one mmc snap-in open.

The command-line method is a little cumbersome, but does the job. Before using this method, it is advisable to close all open MMC snap-ins and then start ESM to avoid confusion with tasklist.exe finding multiple MMC snap-ins.

The second GUI method shows how to specify the DC you want to use with ESM at startup. Not many people know about this because they tend to launch ESM directly from the Microsoft Exchange group in the programs list that is created when you install the Exchange System Management Tools. Sadly, it is not possible to connect to a different DC once ESM has started, as you can with ADUC. Hopefully, Microsoft will implement this feature in a future Service Pack.

See Also

How ESM discovers domain controllers (http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2004/02/16/73915.aspx)



Exchange Server Cookbook
Exchange Server Cookbook: For Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server
ISBN: 0596007175
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 235

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