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)

Chapter 4: Managing Containers and Organizational Units

A default Active Directory domain comes with default containers and a default Organizational Unit (OU). The default containers serve different purposes. The Computers and Users containers act as default locations when you create these objects. Other containers contain important objects, for example, the Builtin container. This container contains all default administrative accounts and groups. The default Domain Controllers OU serves as the location for domain controller objects.

The following containers are available by default:

  • Builtin
  • Computers
  • ForeignSecurityPrincipals
  • Keys
  • LostAndFound
  • Managed Service Accounts
  • NTDS Quotas
  • Program Data
  • System
  • TPM devices
  • Users

    Tip

    In Active Directory Users and Computers (dsa.msc), some of these default containers are hidden. You can display them by selecting the Advanced Features option in the View menu.

We can review the default structure...