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)

Sites

Sites can be explained as physical locations, which contain various objects. They should be able to be described using their boundaries. As an example, users, computers, and network devices located in an office location in London can be treated as a site, and they can be identified uniquely from similar objects located in the Seattle office. The Active Directory site topology can be mainly divided into four designs:

  • Single domain-single sites: This is the most common setup for small and medium site businesses. In this setup, there will be one site and one domain. When we set up the first domain controller in the infrastructure, it is set up as single domain-single site by default. This is easy to maintain.
  • Single domain-multiple sites: In this setup, the infrastructure has only one domain, and it's been extended to multiple sites. It can be based on different buildings...