Manual Connection objects in Active Directory

Hi All,

       I had a question today that I wanted to get to the bottom of, it is an old question but as I obviously forgot the answer in detail, I had to find it.  :)

 The queston was "How can I tell if a connection object is manual or not?"

The first obvious place to look is the name, if it is called  <automatically Generated> then it is KCC generated and therefor automatic.  If it is manual, then it should be easy to tell because most sane people would call them something else.  If not, then how can you tell?

Well, the way to do it is using ADSI edit, via the configuration NC, from here go into sites, <site name>, Servers, <server name>,  NTDS Settings, and then the properties of the connection object.  In here check out the options attribute on the connection object. Now comes the tricky part:

 If this value ( value BITWISE-AND 1) equals 1, the KCC owns the connection. If you modify a KCC-generated connection, the options value changes. If you create a new connection object, the value of the options attribute is set to 0."

I hope this helps someone else..