Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

forest

Synopsis

A collection of trees.

Description

A forest consists of one or more trees. If more than one, the trees are automatically joined together at their root domains by two-way transitive trusts. When you install the first Windows 2000 domain controller in your enterprise, you automatically create a forest with one tree in it. The first Windows 2000 domain you create is:

• The root domain of your first tree

• The forest root domain of your entire forest

Then when you create additional Windows 2000 domains, you can choose whether to:

• Add the new domain to an existing tree of your forest

• Make the new domain the root domain of a new tree in your forest

• Create an entirely new forest (if you select this option, your new domain controller will not be automatically connected to your other domains using two-way transitive trusts)

For more information on trees, see tree in this chapter.

Namespace

While a tree uses a contiguous DNS namespace, the namespace of a forest is not contiguous. The root domain of each tree in a forest must have its own unique DNS domain name to identify it within the forest. However, the forest itself is uniquely identified with respect to other forests by the DNS domain name of its forest root domain, that is, the DNS name of the first domain created in the forest.

As an example, let’s say that the Canadian company MTIT Enterprises (whose DNS domain name is mtit.com) decides to start a separate, worldwide operation called MTIT Enterprises Worldwide, whose domain name ...