Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Sander Berkouwer
Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Sander Berkouwer

Overview of this book

Updated to the Windows Server 2022, this second edition covers effective recipes for Active Directory administration that will help you leverage AD's capabilities for automating network, security, and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure. Starting with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas, and partitions, this book will help you manage domain controllers, organizational units, and default containers. You'll then explore Active Directory sites management as well as identify and solve replication problems. As you progress, you'll work through recipes that show you how to manage your AD domains as well as user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships, and Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. Once you've covered DNS and certificates, you'll work with Group Policy and then focus on federation and security before advancing to Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premise Active Directory with Azure AD. Finally, you'll discover how Microsoft Azure AD Connect synchronization works and how to harden Azure AD. By the end of this AD book, you’ll be able to make the most of Active Directory and Azure AD Connect.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Backing up and restoring Active Directory

To avoid a situation where Active Directory, the backbone of every Microsoft-oriented networking infrastructure, is irreversibly lost, Active Directory backups should be performed. Additionally, restores should be performed regularly in an isolated networking environment to ensure backups can be restored and procedures are up to date and familiar to admins.

This recipe shows how to create backups of Active Directory using Windows Backup.

Getting ready

To make a backup of a domain controller, sign in to the domain controller with a user account that is a member of the Domain Admins group or the Backup Operators group.

To restore a domain controller, you need to know the Directory Services Restore Mode (DSRM) password for the domain controller.

The Windows Backup feature needs to be installed. Use the following PowerShell one-line in an elevated PowerShell window to do so:

Install-WindowsFeature Windows-Server-Backup

To avoid...