Understanding the Active Directory infrastructure
Active Directory (AD) is Microsoft’s technology for representing a distributed database that stores objects in a hierarchical, structured, and secure format. AD objects represent users, computers, peripheral devices, network services, and security settings. Each object is uniquely identified by its name and attributes. The domain, the forest, and the tree represent the main tiers of an AD infrastructure. AD uses the following protocols and services:
- Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is used to access the directory services data.
- Kerberos securely authenticates and proves the identity between users and servers on the network.
- DNS translates domain names into IP addresses.
AD generally offers centralized management for administrators for various services it provides. However, there are several administrative consoles (snap-ins) in Microsoft Management Console (MMC) (mmc.exe) for managing AD services...
