Active Directory overview

Organized

Article from ADMIN 06/2011

By Thomas Drilling

We take a look at Active Directory basics and introduce some new features in Active Directory 2008 R2.

Microsoft software is so widespread in the enterprise environment that it's easy to forget that Windows played a minimal role on the server operating system market back in the 1990s. The market was dominated by Novell NetWare, mainframe solutions, and Unix systems in part. Although Windows theoretically had everything it needed for deployment as a server operating system when NT 4.0 was introduced, it was not until Windows 2000 appeared with Active Directory services that the Windows server operating system really became enterprise-capable.

Just like the Novell Directory Services and their successor eDirectory, Active Directory is based on LDAP. A directory service maps the physical enterprise structure on the intranet, which offers huge benefits in terms of administrative overhead. Administrators have the ability to manage all network resources and user authentication centrally. To allow this to happen, all of the network resources – including users, groups, services, servers, workstations, shares, and devices – are managed in a database [1].

Family Tree

The great-grandfather of all directory services is the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which dates back to 1993. LDAP is basically a protocol that – at the time – supported standardized access to a DAP database; in other words, it was a front end for the X.500 directory service. Because X.500 is implemented as a complete OSI stack across all seven layers, widespread implementation of the X.500 directory service was impossible. In contrast to X.500, LDAP is based on TCP/IP, which has established itself as the standard protocol on intranets.

LDAP acts more or less as a proxy that mediates between X.500 and DAP. Through the years, LDAP has established itself in its own right, becoming the foundation of all modern directory services. The common ground between

...

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).