Re: 2 problems (editing Contact objects and disappearing entries in address book)

Ace Fekay [MVP] wrote: 
In news:6Lgxf.21464$tR5.3008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
Brandon McCombs <none@xxxxxxxx> stated, which I commented on below:

We did exactly your same procedure when we deployed the msc file. We
gave them the 2 files you mentioned and registered them. I don't know
what version of the files we gave them though (files for SP1 or prior
to that but if I had to guess I'd say we gave them the right ones
because we probably didn't have the SP1 version anywhere).

Interesting you did it this way, for not too many are aware of this method. I like it because I don;t have to install the whole adminpak with the extra stuff installed on a delegated user's machine. If upgrading the DCs to SP1, SP1 provides newer versions of these files (and the adminpak) in the DC's system32 folder. Copy them over.

Well, regular users are restricted from having access to AD and AD tools on regular user workstations are frowned upon so I wanted to allow a group of like 5 people to update information in AD but wanted it to be unobtrusive as possible so I spent time learning that when using the MS Installer there are switches with adminpak.msi that allow you to choose which snapins you really want and then I narrowed it down from there as to which files were actually installed and figured out which ones were really needed. It probably took me 2 or 3 hours to do if I remember correctly. 

Somehow I
think what I'm running into is a bug in the msc or mmc since AD is
supposed to be capable of housing millions of objects (although I'm
sure that isn't all on the same server) and besides, the error only
occurs on Contact objects so if it was a capacity issue then user
objects would cause the same problem.


An AD forest (whether one domain or hundreds of domains) will support 4.3 billion objects. No company I know of has anywhere near that, so capacity is not an issue here. Not sure about any bugs, unless after upgrading them and

I remember reading about a site that had the largest recorded AD and I forget what they did (I think webhosting or something) but they had a few million objects in their AD.

At first I thought the mmc was caching all the contact object data but when the same thing didnt happen with user objects I was baffled. By the way, I have 2 DC instances running in VMware VMs and so far I haven't had the same problem with editing the contact info and I've had the data in there a long time(3+ months) (and even had one VM off long enough that the tombstone lifetime got me 2 times and I had to force replication with registry hack temporarily to get things replicating again). At work the contact data has been in place since early Nov. 2005.

the prob disappears, then so be it.

One other thing to look at is exactly what were the users delegated? Only users objects or contacts as well?
Strictly delegated to Contact objects and strictly in a certain OU subtree. While we are on the topic of this I'll let you know about a quirk (maybe even another bug) that I ran into when I was customizing th e taskpad view. When you set a certain OU you want users confined to seeing in the taskpad and you even turn off the Toolbar icons and menu entries that let you get to Advanced Features(or VIew,I forget the name) you can still actually get to Adv. Features by right clicking on an entry. And if you do that then the user is knocked out of your little OU "jail" and gets to see the whole directory again. Very annoying.


Do you have Exchange installed? Are the Contacts mail-enabled?
Yes Exchane 2003 on another set of 2 servers. Contacts have to be mail enabled in this case so that they show up in the Outlook address book (the same ones I mentioned in my 2nd problem).


No errors on the GCs? If Exchange, any DSAccess errors in Exchange's Event logs? (indicative of GC probs).

I don't know. I'll have to see if one of the Admins can let me know about it. I don't have any access to the operational environment and I'm trying to do research on these things on my own time for my own satisfaction because it bugs me. Don't count on me being able to find out though because I know they have other things more important on their ToDo list.



I found out today that office xp is installed if that helps any.  I'll
keep investigating.  Thanks for your help again.

This is guesswork, but I hope our deducing this and breaking it down may help, unless it's something else that we are both not aware of that was done or is running in the enironment.

I'd be satisfied to find out they are both bugs and can be fixed (at least the problem of the MMC freezing up) because then I'd have closure and also a fix (hopefully).
.

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