Recipe 3.3. Determining and Specifying the DC That ESM UsesProblemYou 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. SolutionUsing a graphical user interfaceTo see which DC Exchange System Manager is using:
To choose the DC that that ESM uses, do the following:
Using a command-line interface
DiscussionESM 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 AlsoHow ESM discovers domain controllers (http://blogs.msdn.com/exchange/archive/2004/02/16/73915.aspx) |