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)

Summary

The DNS service is key for modern infrastructures. Maintaining a healthy DNS infrastructure ensures service and resource availability. In this chapter, we covered the basics of DNS and you learned why it's important. Then, we moved on to the hierarchical naming structure and saw how it helps translate organization logical structure to the domain namespace. We also learned how exactly DNS works behind the scene. Then, we looked at DNS records and DNS zones. This also included some explanation on how to create different zones. At the end of the chapter, you learned about different DNS operation modes and replications. I hope this information helps you understand the importance of DNS in an infrastructure and how to use it properly.

In next chapter, we will look at the AD FSMO roles and explore how to place them correctly in an infrastructure.

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