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)

Demoting a domain controller forcefully

It's also an option to forcefully remove a domain controller from Active Directory. While graciously demoting should be the preferred option, you might have to resort to this option.

The process of demoting a domain controller forcefully, consists of these steps:

  1. Performing a metadata cleanup
  2. Deleting the domain controller from DNS
  3. Deleting the computer object for the domain controller
  4. Deleting the SYSVOL replication membership
  1. Deleting the domain controller from Active Directory Sites and Services
  2. Seizing any FSMO roles that were hosted by the domain controller (you can do this first to ensure no impacts for domain members)
  3. Taking care of the existence of global catalog servers

If the domain controller was the last domain controller for a domain in an existing forest, the domain will need to be removed as it is now an orphaned...