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)

Modifying the default location for new user and computer objects

When you join a device to the Active Directory domain or create a user object without context, these objects will be placed in default containers. Devices end up in the Computers container and user objects end up in the Users container. You can change these locations to accommodate for processes, delegation, and Group Policy structure – when a computer object is placed in an OU other than the Computers container, it might get picked up by an endpoint management solution automatically, have proper settings deployed by Group Policy automatically, and be manageable by delegated service desk personnel automatically.

Getting ready

To modify the default location for new user objects and computer objects, the Active Directory environment needs to run the Windows Server 2003 Domain Functional Level (DFL), or higher. If you try to modify the location in an Active Directory environment running the Windows 2000 Server...