3.18. Determining if Global Catalog Promotion Is Complete
Problem
You want to determine if a domain controller is a global catalog server. After you initially enable the global catalog on a domain controller, it can take some time for all of the read-only naming contexts to replicate to it, depending on how large your forest is.
Solution
Query the isGlobalCatalogReady
attribute on the
RootDSE
for the domain controller. A TRUE value
means the server is a global catalog and a FALSE value indicates it
is not.
For more information on how to query the RootDSE
,
see Recipe 4.1.
Discussion
Once a server has completed initial replication of the global
catalog, the isGlobalCatalogReady
attribute in the
RootDSE will be marked TRUE. Another way to determine if a domain
controller has been at least flagged to become a global catalog is by
checking if the options
attribute on the
nTDSDSA
object for the server has been set to 1.
Note that this does not necessarily mean the server is accepting
requests as a global catalog. An additional query to the
RootDSE
as described in the Solution, or directly
to port 3268 (the global catalog port)
could confirm it.
See Also
Recipe 4.1 for viewing the RootDSE
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