How to find the global catalog of my network in ADDC?

Question

I'm learning IT right now, and I have this situation.

The employee who was the administrator, got out of the company. But he doesn't leave a documentation to tell me which of my ADDC (Active Directory Domain Controller) is the PDC, I mean I'm interested to fin the global catalog and structure of my network.

Does you know a post from TechNet or some site to find this PDC in Windows Server 2008 R2?

Answer 1

Run the following from a command promt:

nslookup
set type=serv
_gc._tcp."FQDN"

Answer 2

You can either open Active Directory Sites and services, expand sites -> servers and look at the NTDS settings of each server you have, there will be a tick box on the general tab that will be checked if the server is a global catalog.

Alternatively, if you have quite a lot of servers and don't want to have to do this for each one, you can use nslookup:

Find a list of global catalogs using nslookup

As for PDC though, these haven't really existed since windows NT, there is however a PDC emulator FSMO role which is held by one domain controller that you can find using the following command:

dsquery server -hasfsmo pdc

You can see the other FSMO roles here:

Identify Operations Master Roles

Answer 3

You can display the Global Catalog Servers in the domain you are logged in to using Nslookup.exe:

1. Open a CMD.EXE window.

2. Type the following command and press Enter:

nslookup gc._msdcs.%USERDNSDOMAIN%