adclient.preferred.site

This configuration parameter enables you to identify a specific site to use to locate available domain controllers. By default, the adclient process uses CLDAP NETLOGON requests to automatically discover its site based on how sites are configured using Active Directory Sites and Services. This default behavior enables adclient to select domain controllers in the same site as preferred domain controllers because they are likely to provide the best performance and least replication delays. This configuration parameters enables you to override the site returned by Active Directory and use a specific site.

If you don’t define a value for the parameter, adclient continues to discover sites based on how sites are configured using Active Directory Sites and Services.

If you want to define a specific site to use, you can use the following override options:

  • You can specify a “universal” site override that does not include an Active Directory forest in the parameter name. The override applies to all Active Directory domains that do not have a forest-specific override.

  • You can specify one or more “forest-specific” site overrides that includes the name of an Active Directory forest in the parameter names. This type ofoverride limits the domain controllers to the domain controllers in the specified forest-specific site.

Forest-specific site overrides take precedence over universal site overrides. Depending on your requirements, you can use the site override options to override sites for all forests, specific forests, or a combination of the two.

The following is an example a “universal” site override that applies to all forests that do not have a forest specific override:

adclient.preferred.site: my-preferred-site

To specify a forest-specific site override, you specify the configuration parameter using the following format:

adclient.preferred.site.forest_name: my-forest-site

The following example illustrates how you would define the configuration parameters to use the USNORTH Active Directory site for all forests except the ocean-site forestspecific site.

adclient.preferred.site: USNORTH
adclient.preferred.site.ocean.net: ocean-site