Infrastructure Master

The infrastructure master performs two critical actions in multidomain forests:

• It updates references to objects in other domains in the forest. In doing so, it ensures that changes made by different administrators from different locations are not in conflict. Such changes include adding users or groups or modifying group memberships. For example, if two administrators in two different cities were to create a user named Mary at the same time, a problem would occur. In this case, the infrastructure master would generate a uniqueness error. Further, if you were to create a user account in one domain from a domain controller in another domain, you would need to contact the infrastructure master in the domain where the account will be created.

• It tracks group membership changes that cross domain boundaries within the forest. For example, domain local groups can contain users and global groups in other domains, and global groups can be made members of domain local groups in other domains. In addition, these groups can be members of universal groups and vice versa. The infrastructure master ensures that these changes occur properly and without conflict.