So I needed to manage multiple domains from a machine which is not on any of them. How can I run multiple MMC consoles without being on any of them? BTW this is in a Windows Active Directory environment only.
Lets say the domains are as follows
London.co.uk
Dev.London.co.uk
Manchester.co.uk
Birmingham.co.uk
Dev.Birmingham.co.uk
NB. All domains are accessible from an layer 3 (IP) perspective either via VPN’s, direct links, or static routing.
Firstly you have to tell the machine where one of the Domain Controllers (DC) are so it knows where to send requests? This is done using the host file on windows. This article is not going to go into detail about this, but see below for entries into host file.
192.168.10.10 London.co.uk
192.168.20.20 Dev.London.co.uk
192.168.30.30 Manchester.co.uk
10.10.40.40 Birmingham.co.uk
10.10.50.50 Dev.Birmingham.co.uk
Once DNS has been refreshed or the system restarted you have the ability to run this command.
/NETONLY – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490994.aspx
This command allows you to run as a user form that domain when not on the domain.
runas /netonly /user:domain\username \”mmc.exe dsa.msc /server=192.168.10.10″ <– if wanting to connect to London.co.uk
This can be added to a batch file to request the username as shown below
@echo off
set /p id=”Enter Username: ” %=% runas
/netonly /user:london.co.uk\%id% “mmc.exe dsa.msc /server=192.168.10.10”
It does however mean having a batch file per domain but once configured allows you to switch between different environments without having to jump onto servers in that environment. Anyway this made my life easier and hope it helps someone else.
Marc
SilenceSpeaksVolumes 