Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

What is DNS?

In mobile phones, we have phone books. If we need to save someone's phone number, how we do that? Do we just enter the number and save it? No, we attach the number to a person name or something we can remember. So, the next time we open the contact list, we can easily find it. In Boaz Yakin's film Safe, there was a little Chinese girl who could remember long numeric codes. But if I had such a memory, I have a lot of other things I would like to remember rather than a bunch of numbers. It is the same with when you are dealing with IP addresses. I remember a few of the most commonly used IP addresses in infrastructure. But I do not remember most others. I remember lots of servers by their hostnames rather than IP addresses. This is because hostnames are more user friendly and easy to remember than IP addresses. This is what exactly DNS does. It maps IP addresses...