2

I have a domain (myDomain.com) set up with Active Directory and 3 DCs (serverA, serverB, serverC). Each DC has a set of shares, which are accessed via UNC, such as \\server1\share1. Today I noticed that I can access one of the servers by referencing the domain instead of the server: \\myDomain.com\share1.

My question is, what attributes determine the server that can be referenced in this way?

My suspicion is that it has to do with FSMO roles. In my case, the DC that has the Schema master and Domain naming master roles is the one that can be accessed via the domain name.

Thanks for any illumination you can offer.

Improve this question
2
  • Actually is more to do with dns.... If you do an nslookup on just mydomain.com is should resolve to one of your domain controllers.
    – Drifter104
    Dec 14, 2018 at 16:40
  • @Drifter104, thanks for that info. So how does a DC become synonymous with the domain in DNS?
    – BCH
    Dec 14, 2018 at 16:43

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

All Domain Controllers are accessible in this manner as they all host the NETLOGON and SYSVOL shared folders that domain clients access. You'll connect to whichever DC name is returned in the DNS query for the domain name, which are returned in a round-robin fashion.

Improve this answer
6
  • Thanks @joeqwerty. So is I test this over time, I should expect to see different servers? Over the last 2 days it's always been the same DC.
    – BCH
    Dec 14, 2018 at 16:52
  • Are all of the DC's in the same subnet?
    – joeqwerty
    Dec 14, 2018 at 18:34
  • Yep - all same subnet. I just did a test of shutting down the DC that resolves to myDomain.com and doing nslookup on the domain. nslookup fails when that server is down.
    – BCH
    Dec 14, 2018 at 19:12
  • You'll likely continue to connect to the DC which handled your computers logon -- i.e. your LogonServer (echo %logonserver% / $env:LogonServer). This can change over time.
    – Semicolon
    Dec 14, 2018 at 19:18
  • @Semicolon, that's probably right. I still can only see the one DC ever resolving the domain name when I do \\\\myDomain.com\share1. If joeqwerty is correct about the round-robin fashion, I would expect to see something different.
    – BCH
    Dec 14, 2018 at 19:25

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .