Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook

By : Sander Berkouwer
Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook

By: Sander Berkouwer

Overview of this book

Active Directory is an administration system for Windows administrators to automate network, security and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure. This book starts off with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas and partitions. Next, you'll learn how to manage domain controllers, organizational units and the default containers. Going forward, you'll explore managing Active Directory sites as well as identifying and solving replication problems. The next set of chapters covers the different components of Active Directory and discusses the management of users, groups and computers. You'll also work through recipes that help you manage your Active Directory domains, manage user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships and group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. You'll understand how to work with Group Policy and how to get the most out of it. The last set of chapters covers federation, security and monitoring. You will also learn about Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. You'll discover how Azure AD Connect synchronization works, which will help you manage Azure AD. By the end of the book, you have learned about Active Directory and Azure AD in detail.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Implementing LAPS

Microsoft's free Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) allows admins to periodically change the password for the local administrator password on domain-joined devices. This recipe shows how to implement and use it.

Getting ready

First, download LAPS from http://aka.ms/LAPS. Download the *.msi file that corresponds to the client operating system architecture(s) used in the organization. Most likely, this will be x64.

Make sure that all domain controllers in the environment run Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 or a newer version of Windows Server.

If your organization places devices in the default Computers container, move the computer objects that you want to be part of LAPS from this container...