Understanding Active Directory

Are there websites which explains Active Directory in plain simple terms?

The books I have read so far goes overboard with complex explanations on Active Directory.

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Webmaster

www.techexams.net/technotes/xp/adsintro.shtml

I bet you can find an article at www.mcmcse.com and certainly at www.techtutorials.com as well. If all else fails: www.microsoft.com has loads of articles about AD, both intro's and advanced papers.

Feel free to post any questions here as well.

RZetlin

Webmaster wrote:

www.techexams.net/technotes/xp/adsintro.shtml

I bet you can find an article at www.mcmcse.com and certainly at www.techtutorials.com as well. If all else fails: www.microsoft.com has loads of articles about AD, both intro's and advanced papers.

Feel free to post any questions here as well.

Base on your example, a creation of a domain is also a root. (mycompany.com)

sales.mycompany.com is known as a tree in the domain?

If you have two trees, sales.mycompany.com and finance.mycompany.com that is considered to be forest?

Webmaster

No, sales.mycompany.com is a child domain of microsof.com. Domain names are read in reverse order:

Top: .com
root: microsoft
child: sales

sales.mycompany.com and finance.mycompany.com (are branches/ childs that) belong to the same tree:

Unlike a real-life forest, in AD you have a forest even with a single domain or single tree (domain with . The first domain becomes the forest root domain. Another way of putting it is that as long as the namespace is contiguous (i.e. techexams.net, www.techexams.net, mail.techexams.net, dallas.mail.techexams.net etc.) it's the same tree.

If you want domains and trees for my companyA.com and companyB.com and want users from one tree to access resources in domains in the other tree, you need to create a forest (instead of a separate new domain or tree (if the domain has child domains). So after creating the forest by creating the domain companyA.com, you can add a new root domain (not forest root domain) to the forest you created by creating companyA.com domain(s).

Check out the following links for some more detailed examples:

www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/technologies/activedirectory/plan/w2kdomar.mspx

garv221

Yeah, AD is tricky. The best way to lern is to throw yourself into a running enviroment.

NPA24

garv221 wrote:

Yeah, AD is tricky. The best way to lern is to throw yourself into a running enviroment.

I completely agree. Go get Microsoft Virtual PC and install Windows 2003 Server and Windows XP and create a domain. Play around with adding it to the domain. Then make it more interesting by adding another virtual pc running Windows 2000. The more and more you tinker with it, the better you will understand it.