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)

About FSMO roles

Active Directory uses the multi-master model, where domain controllers are all able to respond to client requests. When comparing to the old Windows NT 4 server-style Primary Domain Controller (PDC) and Backup Domain Controller (BDC) models, where BDCs were read-only until switched to become the only PDC, this model offers many benefits.

However, some tasks within Active Directory don't work well with the multi-master model. When designing Active Directory, Microsoft created five roles outside of the model, labeled FSMO roles, to prevent conflicting updates.

These roles can be flexibly assigned to domain controllers and seized when a domain controller holding the role fails. These roles offer single master operations within the scope of the roles, hence the name "FSMO role."

In every Active Directory environment, there are five roles with two different scopes:

Table 3.1 – FSMO roles and their scopes

In an environment...