Active Directory Fundamentals

Active Directory Replication: What it is and how it works

What you will learn from this article? Information in the Active Directory (AD) network is modified or updated constantly. In such cases, if any information is updated in one domain controller (DC) of the AD network, all other DCs in the network should also be updated with the new information. This process is done in AD through replication. In this article, we will take a look at what is AD…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

Understanding Active Directory Tombstone

What are Tombstones in Active Directory? When you delete an object from the Active Directory (AD) database, it’s marked as a tombstone object instead of being fully removed. By default, each tombstone object remains in the database for 180 days. Once this tombstone’s lifetime value is exceeded, the tombstone object is automatically deleted by the garbage collection process.
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Active Directory Fundamentals

Access Control List (ACLs) and Access Control Entries (ACEs)

What you will learn: In this article, we will take a look at what an access control list (ACL) and an access control entry (ACE) are, the components that make up an ACL and ACE, and also dive into the types of ACLs and ACEs, and their purposes. What are Access Control Lists, and why do we need them? In an Active Directory network, not all users or computers would require access to all the…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

Difference between Disabled, Expired and Locked Account

Introduction: The process of administering and monitoring the activities of the Active Directory service, which is typically found in Windows Server operating systems, is known as Active Directory management. The major goal of AD management is to automate Active Directory user provisioning operations, compliance with rules and audits, security, and centralized access to each user’s…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

What is a workgroup and how is it set up?

Authenticating users in a computer network. Employees in any organization, big or small, need to log in to their computers at the start of their work day. Logging in gives them access to shared files, folders, printers, critical applications related to work, as well as the internet. Organizations need to authenticate and verify the identity of each user before they gain access to these…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

What are Domain Functional Levels and how do you raise them?

Domain Functional Levels – An overview Domain functional level (DFL) determines the features of a Domain Controller (DC) based on the Windows Server Operating System (OS) it runs on. A feature set of a particular DFL will be available for a DC if it runs on the operating system version that is compatible with the functional level. Note that, the OS version constraint is only for the…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

The structures and benefits of organizational units

Organizational units (OUs) When you deploy Active Directory (AD) in your company, you may decide to create multiple organizational units (OUs) within your domain. An OU is a container within your domain that holds users, groups, computers, and other objects. You use an OU to store similar objects, making them easy to access and administer them. An OU will always be contained within a single…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

Active Directory Schema: An overview into Schema Extension

Active Directory (AD) schema is a blueprint that describes the rules about the type of objects that can be stored in the AD as well as the attributes related to these objects. The schema thus defines the content, and the structure of the object classes, and theobject attributes used to create an object. While creating a new object, the AD references the classes defined in the schema and…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

What is a Read Only Domain Controller (RODC)

Introduction A read only domain controller (RODC) is a type of domain controller that has read-only partitions of Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) database. RODC is available in Windows server 2008 OS and in its succeeding versions. Enterprises tend to deploy RODC under two conditions viz., When there is not enough physical security to the datacenter. When there…
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Active Directory Fundamentals

Active Directory Subnets, Sites, and Site links

Active Directory Subnets A single, physical network can be broken into smaller segments called subnets in a process called subnetting. Each subnet on a network is connected by routers. Every device in a network, whether it’s a domain controller (DC), a server, or a client, must belong to a particular subnet. By using subnets, an organization won’t need to acquire a new network number…
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