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)

User accounts

In AD infrastructure, what is the most common administrative task? Obviously, it's creating and managing user accounts. A user account does not only hold a username and password, it also holds data such as group memberships, roaming profile path, home folder path, login script info, remote dial in permissions, and many more. Every time we set up a new account, we need to define values for these attributes. When it increases the number of attributes and features that need to adjust on the account creation process, it also increases the number of mistakes that can happen. Here, however, we are dealing with identities, and even a small mistake can cost organization lot. As an example, if you add a user to the wrong user group accidentally, he/she will have access to some resources which they are not supposed to have.

When I create a SOW or implementation plan for...