L

latency

Latency is an intrinsic characteristic of Active Directory™ replication. Latency is the delay between the time an update is applied to a given replica and the time that the update is propagated to some other replica. Latency is sometimes referred to as propagation delay.

Background

The replication model used in Active Directory is called multi-master loose consistency with convergence. In this model, the directory can have many replicas; a replication system propagates changes made at any given replica to all other replicas. The replicas are not guaranteed to be consistent with each other at any particular point in time ("loose consistency"), since changes can be applied to any replica at any time ("multi-master"). If the system is allowed to reach a steady state, in which no new updates are occurring and all previous updates have been completely replicated, all replicas are guaranteed to converge on the same set of values ("convergence").

LDAP

LDAP is the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, which is the standard Internet communications protocol used to communicate with Active Directory™. Both versions 2 and 3 of LDAP are supported.

local group

As in earlier versions of Windows NT®, administrators on member servers and workstations can create local groups. These remain strictly local to the machine where they are created, and do not appear in the directory.

Windows® 2000 introduces the domain local group which does appear in the directory. Domain local groups provide the functionality of local groups defined on domain controllers in earlier versions of Windows NT.