Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1. A Brief Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft's network operating system (NOS ) directory, built on top of Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. It enables administrators to manage enterprise-wide information efficiently from a...

Chapter 2. Active Directory Fundamentals This chapter aims to bring you up to speed on the basic concepts and terminology used with Active Directory. It is important to understand each component of Active Directory before embarking on a d...

Chapter 3. Naming Contexts and Application Partitions Due to the distributed nature of Active Directory, it is necessary to segregate data into partitions. If data partitioning were not used, every domain controller would have to replicat...

Chapter 4. Active Directory Schema The schema is the blueprint for data storage in Active Directory. Each object in Active Directory is an instance of a class in the schema. A user object, for example, exists as an instance of the user cl...

Chapter 5. Site Topology and Replication This chapter introduces a major feature of Active Directory: multi-master replication. Active Directory was one of the first LDAP-based directories to offer multi-master replication. Most directori...

Chapter 6. Active Directory and DNS One of the big advantages of Active Directory over its predecessor, Windows NT, is the reliance on the Domain Name System (DNS) as opposed to the Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) for name resolu...

Chapter 7. Profiles and Group Policy Primer Profiles and group policies are large topics, and they are worth treating properly so that you get the most from them in your environment. The goal of policy-based administration is for an admin...

Chapter 8. Designing the Namespace The basic emphasis of this chapter is on reducing the number of domains that you require for Active Directory while gaining administrative control over sections of the Active Directory domain namespace u...

Chapter 9. Creating a Site Topology As we mentioned in Chapter 5, there are two aspects to replication: How data gets replicated around an existing network of links between DCsHow the Knowledge Consistency Checker generates and maintains...

Chapter 10. Designing Organization-Wide Group Policies This chapter takes an in-depth look at Group Policy Objects (GPOs ), focusing on three areas: How GPOs work in Active DirectoryHow to manage GPOs with the Group Policy Object Edi...

Chapter 11. Active Directory Security: Permissions and Auditing Permissions can be set in Active Directory in the same way they are set for files. Although you may not care that everyone in the tree can read all your users' phone numbers,...

Chapter 12. Designing and Implementing Schema Extensions For Active Directory to hold any object, such as a user, it needs to know what the attributes and characteristics of that object are. In other words, it needs a blueprint for that o...

Chapter 13. Backup, Recovery, and Maintenance A very important though often overlooked aspect of maintaining Active Directory is having a solid disaster recovery plan in place. While the reported incidents of corruption of Active Director...

Chapter 14. Upgrading to Windows Server 2003 The first version of Active Directory with Windows 2000 was surprisingly stable and robust. Microsoft does not have the best track record for initial releases of products, but they must be comm...

Chapter 15. Upgrading to Windows Server 2003 R2 Windows Server 2003 has been available to the public since March 2003. Since its release, Microsoft has also released several feature packs that add additional functionality to the base...

Chapter 16. Migrating from Windows NT Knowing how to design Active Directory is very useful, but it's not the end of the story. You may already have an existing NetWare or Windows NT infrastructure and want to consider migrating to Active...

Chapter 17. Integrating Microsoft Exchange Exchange[*] has been the driving reason behind many companies' move to Active Directory. Starting with Exchange 2000, Exchange requires an Active Directory infrastructure, and the dependencies it...

Chapter 18. Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) Shortly after Microsoft released Windows 2000 Active Directory, developers and administrators started asking for a standalone Microsoft LDAP service that was similar to Active Directory...

Chapter 19. Interoperability, Integration, and Future Direction Microsoft's Directory Services strategy has come a long way in the past few years. Even before Active Directory, several Microsoft products utilized a directory, although mos...

Chapter 20. Scripting with ADSI This chapter covers the basics of ADSI and VBScript so that even inexperienced programmers and system administrators can understand how to write useful scripts. If you're used to another language, such as V...

Chapter 21. IADs and the Property Cache Each object in a directory has a series of attributes, or properties, that uniquely define it. Although properties can vary from object to object, ADSI supports the manipulation of a core set of six...

Chapter 22. Using ADO for Searching Microsoft's ADO technology lets you conduct database searches and retrieve the results through a flexible interface called resultsets. ADO also lets you update information in a database directly or with...

Chapter 23. Users and Groups In this chapter, we will show you how to automate the creation and manipulation of user and group accounts . Although tools to create user and group accounts already exist (e.g., the Windows 2000 Resource Kit...

Chapter 24. Basic Exchange Tasks In this chapter, we will show you how to automate some of the basic Exchange settings, specifically concerning users (and by extension inetOrgPersons), groups, and contacts. Although tools to manage Exch...

Chapter 25. Shares and Print Queues ADSI can be used for much more than just user, group, or generic directory manipulation. ADSI provides many interfaces that you can use to manipulate persistent and dynamic objects for a computer. P...

Chapter 26. Permissions and Auditing Security descriptors (SDs), access control lists (ACLs), and access control entries (ACEs) have been used for files and directories on NTFS file systems for years. The same concepts apply to securing A...

Chapter 27. Extending the Schema and the Active Directory Snap-ins This chapter takes a look at two different areas: programmatically extending the schema and customizing the functionality of the Active Directory administrative MMC snap-i...

Chapter 28. Using ADSI and ADO from ASP or VB Two important features of Active Directory require administrators to create their own tools: The ability to extend the Active Directory schema with your own classes and attributes, which allow...

Chapter 29. Scripting with WMI The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) API was developed by Microsoft in 1998 in response to the ever-growing need for developers and system administrators to have a common, scriptable API to manage th...

Chapter 30. Manipulating DNS DNS is a core technology of Active Directory that cannot be overlooked. Although features such as Active Directory Integrated DNS can take a lot of the hassle of managing DNS servers and zones out of your hand...

Chapter 31. Getting Started with VB.NET and System.Directory Services Unless you've been hiding in a cave in recent years, you've undoubtedly heard of Microsoft's latest initiative, called .NET. At a low level, .NET is the basis for a new...