Active Directory Administration Cookbook

▶Book Description
Active Directory is an administration system for Windows administrators to automate network, security and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure.

This book starts off with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas and partitions. Next, you learn how to manage domain controllers, organizational units and the default containers.

Going forward, you deep dive into managing Active Directory sites as well as identifying and solving replication problems. The next set of chapters covers the different components of Active Directory and discusses the management of users, groups and computers. You also go through recipes that help you manage your Active Directory domains, manage user and groups objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships and group Managed Service Accounts with PowerShell.

You learn how to work with Group Policy and how to get the most out of it. The last set of chapters covers federation, security and monitoring. You will also learn about Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. You learn how Azure AD Connect synchronization works, which will help you manage Azure AD.

By the end of the book, you have learned in detail about Active Directory and Azure AD, too.

▶What You Will Learn
- Manage new Active Directory features, such as the Recycle Bin, group Managed Service Accounts, and fine-grained password policies
- Work with Active Directory from the command line and use Windows PowerShell to automate tasks
- Create and remove forests, domains, and trusts
- Create groups, modify group scope and type, and manage memberships
- Delegate control, view and modify permissions
- Optimize Active Directory and Azure AD in terms of security

▶Key Features
- Expert solutions for the federation, certificates, security, and monitoring with Active Directory
- Explore Azure AD and AD Connect for effective administration on cloud
- Automate security tasks using Active Directory and PowerShell

▶Who This Book Is For
This book will cater to administrators of existing Active Directory Domain Services environments and/or Azure AD tenants, looking for guidance to optimize their day-to-day effectiveness. Basic networking and Windows Server Operating System knowledge would come in handy.

▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Optimizing Forests, Domains, and Trusts, provides recipes for structuring the logical components of Active Directory, including UPN suffixes, trusts, domains, and forests. Several recipes help lift Active Directory to new heights, where others help expand the functionality of Active Directory in terms of collaboration.

- Chapter 2, Managing Domain Controllers, shows how to promote, demote, and inventory both domain controllers and read-only domain controllers; these are Active Directory's physical components.

- Chapter 3, Managing Active Directory Roles and Features, covers Flexible Single Operations Master (FSOM) roles and global catalog servers for addressing all your organization's multi-forest and multi-domain needs.

- Chapter 4, Managing Containers and Organizational Units, provides Active Directory admins who like cleanliness, with the rationale and steps necessary to categorize objects into organizational units and containers. Lazy admins learn how to properly delegate, too.

- Chapter 5, Managing Active Directory Sites and Troubleshooting Replication, details how to optimize multiple domain controllers in multiple geographic locations using sites, site links, and bridgehead servers, and how to troubleshoot replication.

- Chapter 6, Managing Active Directory Users, contains recipes to help out colleagues when they start working, leave the organization, and every change in between. The proactive recipe on finding locked-out accounts helps admins to stay ahead of the game.

- Chapter 7, Managing Active Directory Groups, covers all types of groups in Active Directory, along with how to create, modify, and delete them, no matter how nested these groups are. Getting rid of empty groups is easy with the last recipe in this chapter.

- Chapter 8, Managing Active Directory Computers, provides ways to keep your organization's devices in check. Of course, it also details how to prevent non-privileged users to join devices to your environment.

- Chapter 9, Getting the Most Out of Group Policy, enables admins to get the most out of Group Policy! Managing tens or thousands of devices won't be an issue anymore with the recipes in this chapter.

- Chapter 10, Securing Active Directory, provides ways to improve the security stance of your Active Directory environment. Each recipe in this chapter makes your environment less attractive to attackers.

- Chapter 11, Managing Federation, covers ADFS. Build the perfect ADFS farm using the recipes, or decommission one.

- Chapter 12, Handling Authentication in a Hybrid World (AD FS, PHS, PTA, and 3SO), details hybrid identity between Active Directory and Azure AD in terms of ADFS, Password Hash Synchronization (PHS), Pass-Through Authentication (PTA), and Seamless Single Signon(SSO).

- Chapter 13, Handling Synchronization in a Hybrid World (Azure AD Connect), covers Azure AD Connect and the key role it plays in synchronizing between Active Directory and Azure AD.

- Chapter 14, Hardening Azure AD, provides recipes to keep your organization's Azure AD tenant in check. The recipes explore the many possibilities of Azure AD, including conditional access and Azure AD Identity Protection.