5 Roles Every Windows Server Administrator Must Know

FSMO- Flexible Single Master Operations                                                                            
In a Windows environment these 5 unique roles are in the most ways a holy grail of every Microsoft Windows Server administrator. If you find yourself unaware of these roles in your troubleshooting just know that most of your network's weird, unproductive activities could as well be well coming from there. An unauthorised access or breach to Active Directory is so dangerous to security expert of the organisations as the AD is the security point of entry. It deserves the at most attention for the smooth domain or forest operations. 

• Access tokens, 
• password verification, 
• account user holder, 
• service authorisation and so many more services.

Forest Roles                                                                                                                                              

• Schema Master | The schema master is forest wide and there's one for each forest. Remember the adprep /domainprep command. It worked because this role was operational.

• Domain Naming | Crucial for upgrades and demotions. It must be online when domains and application partitions in a forest are added or removed.

NetDOM /Query FSMO-Command to use determining the role holder

Domain                                                                                                                                                     

• PDC Emulator | This role must be online and accessible 24/7 for password and user account updates. Its a default target for the domain group policy and some admin tools

• RID Master | Must be online for newly promoted domain controllers to obtain a local RID pool thats required to advertise or when existing domain controllers have to update their current RID pool allocation.

• Infrastructure Master | Responsible for cross-domain reference and phantoms from the global catalog.

In Cyber Security is Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Important?

Planning seats as the very key in all organisations. As part of planning organisations ensures that business continuity and disaster recovery are initiated. Even at a very scant scene all organisations and or those entrusted in charge have thought even about what would happen when a disaster occurred affecting the organisation; Questions are raised such as what will happen to customer private information in the case of a public leak, malicious and unauthorised access and distribution of private information? What will become of financial transaction records in the event of a catastrophe like fire, earthquake to the organisation?

These key questions are only addressed by the system called Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. Countries (e.g a "Zambian disaster management act no 13, which was assented to on the 13th April 2010) have gone ahead to develop policies, plan and manage for such uneventful days making this system a very important aspect starting from an individual straight to nations. It makes business continuity a very important part of planning for all organisations. Business Continuity concerned with processes and procedures will address areas such as how the business key functions is going to continue to operate in the and after incidence of disturbances. Potential business continuity problems may include the illness or departure of key organisational members, a supply chain breakdown, catastrophic failures or critical malware infections. On the other hand the Disaster Recovery aspect will be specific and plan for inadvertent events happening and how the business will rise and recover to continue in its operations. e.g How backups will be restored and databases made functional, accessible to the organisation after a malware outbreak . The disaster recovery unit will also ensure and ascertain for mitigations in the and during aftermath ?