What is Active Directory

Active Directory

what is active directory and active directory is quite simply a database now it's a distributed database meaning it's stored in multiple places and it's a multi master database that means I can make changes in most instances notice I said most instances we'll talk about those exceptions later but I can make a change in any one location of the database that will automatically be replicated around to the other locations now in this database we're going to store information about all of our users all of our security groups and all of our computers predominantly there are some other little things that will get stored we'll talk about later but what's happened here let me draw you a little diagram this is going to be a little crude I've got a new mouse it's hard to use too so I'll just make all kind of excuses but I want to drive just a little crude diagram here I've got a server and a load active directory and so active directory is a database and notice I'm going to draw a little hard disk here that's a hard disk believe it or not now I have all these computers out in my domain if you 
will and I have grouped all these computers into a domain and now I want to administer them centrally and so what I'm going to do is create an active directory database here and this will contain information about every one of these computers and every one of the users that log on to these computers and so forth and it is all stored actually my arrows should probably go the other way it's all stored in this one Active Directory database and so I can take care of security on this database and so forth then I can add another server 

Active Directory

later on and I can put a copy of that Active Directory database on this server as well and then users can connect to this server and get my Active Directory information and Active Directory between these two copies will replicate and keep itself day on both sides okay so that's what Active Directory is storing information about all my users my security groups and computers think about that for the users users have logon names they have passwords addresses managers they report to zip codes all that sort of thing so once we've got all that information in the Active Directory database now Active Directory can start to perform some functionalities for us first of all it can authenticate users and computers when the user tries to get on to the system they have to give us a username and a password that's checked against Active Directory to person knew that shared secret between the user and Active Directory same for computers 

Active Directory

access control we can once they log on we can now say ok so I know who you are but now what can you do here what folders can you open and what files can you open and what folders and files can you not open and I'll prevent them from the happening so that's another thing Active Directory does next thing is auditing functionality it will help us watch and see what's happening in Active Directory if I see that you are constantly trying to open folders that you don't have permissions to it's either a training opportunity because you're confused or there's a security problem you're trying to go places that you're not supposed to go now let's talk about some terms in Active Directory first of all there is Active Directory you'll see ad obviously that means Active Directory you will also see a DDS out there that means Active Directory domain services we'll talk about those in other places in the video ID a is one that's just recently popped up for me it could have been out there for months and I'm going to sleep but I've noticed just in the server 2008 we have really seen this in the Microsoft world and it means identity and access Active Directory is an ID a system or it provides ID a functionalities or services LDS talks about the lightweight directory services 

Active Directory

we will talk about those later on the video but it just wanted you to know what you're seeing or hearing when you see these acronyms used out there and then ADCs this is Active Directory certificate services you will hear that one as well that has a whole idea about public/private key encryption and certificates to identify and provide that third-party validation and so forth we'll talk about that as well later on in the course so that's a rough overview of Active Directory now in the next couple of videos I'll draw some animations about Active Directory help you understand the various pieces and parts of it and then we'll jump into some of the functionalities and some of the things that you're going to be tested on on this exam 7640 a configuring Active Directory and a Windows Server 2008 environment .