As a Visual Studio Programmer, sometime you need to mimic the production server. And one of the though one is active directory. First of all, if you have Microsoft Azure subscription, your life much easier by creating a template VM that cover Active Directory. However, if you want to understand about AD such us to integrate between Office 365 and AD, understand its work, or debugging the AD. This article is for you
Basic Knowledge AD
There are several jargon on AD which are
- AD Domains. A domain that is used as a FQDN (Full Qualified Domain Names) for the active directory for example ridilabs.net, and cms.ridilabs.net. AD domains shows the tree structure of a domain.
- AD forest. A top most domain that combines sets domain into an AD. Forest can communicate with the others forest to access the resources. For example, Ridilabs forest has several domains such as cms.ridilabs.net, ridilabs.net, and mail.ridilabs.net. The Ridilabs forest can communicate to the others forest.
- AD sites. A site that correspond to a domain. For example, I have Ridilabs.net, it has three sites namely ID (192.168.0.0), SG (192.168.1.0), and US (192.168.2.0). Although it has three sites, the domain is still Ridilabs.net. The sites can be across geographically but still acknowledges as a single domain.
- AD Domain Controller (AD DC). AD DC holds database the resources on AD such as users, objects (any information), and domains. The failure of AD DC will make the AD is 'dead'. Therefore, it is recommended that we have more than one DC.
- AD Global Catalogue Servers (AD GC). AD GC is an additional role for AD DC that holds information to authenticate the clients (login/logout).
- AD Organizational Units (AD OU). AD OU is mechanism to classify the resources to administrate the function. It can be classify based on the computer or users. For example, on the organization have finance users (Finance OU) and IT users (IT OU). Each OU can be applied with policy and rules.
- AD FSMO (Flexible Single Master Operation) roles. A sets of roles that ready to use for the AD such as Schema master, Domain Naming Master, PDC master, RID master, Infrastructure master. Each roles have a function
That's all for today, on the next post we will discuss the basic scenario on AD.