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The Infrastruc­ ture Master deals with groups and group memberships for all domain objects. It is also an Infrastructure Master's role to update other domains with changes that have been made to objects. Global Catalog Server Another server function that can be assigned to a domain controller is the Global Catalog server. The Global Catalog server maintains a subset of Active Directory object attributes that are most commonly searched for by users or cli­ ent computers, such as a user’s logon name.

All of these mappings were located in a file named HOSTS, which was kept on a central computer on the network and perhaps mirrored on a few additional computers. Whenever a computer needed to resolve a host name, it consulted that file (occasionally copying it to the local com­ puter). As the network grew, however, it became impossible to use a single file to hold all the mappings. There were three problems with the existing setup: ■ The file became too big to manage effectively and required administration many times per day.

For a complex network, a directory service should provide an efficient way to manage, find, and access all the resources on a network—resources such as computers, users, printers, shared folders, and many others. A good directory service implementation should provide a number of core benefits: ■ Centralization The idea behind centralization is to reduce the number of direc­ tories on a network. Bringing information about all network resources into a cen­ tralized directory provides a single point of management, easing the administration of resources and allowing you to more effectively delegate admin­ istrative tasks.