Real World Active Directory Architecture (With Demonstrations)

LESSON 1: ACTIVE DIRECTORY HISTORY

Purpose of this series

Active Directory in depth!! (but not the usual way.. No death by slides!!)

Designing an Active Directory Forest/Domain (Different architectures and implementations)

Demonstrations of the different design architectures and their implementations (Using VirtualBox and GNS3)

ACTIVE DIRECTORY HISTORY

Is this important? What is Active Directory? Where did Active Directory come from?

ACTIVE DIRECTORY HISTORY Is this Important?

PHILOSOPHY (the reason behind a technology. Why it came into existence) How would you be able to properly diagnose the right solution to a problem if you're not familiar with the problems that a solution was created to solve?

What is ACTIVE DIRECTORY?

IT IS A DIRECTORY

A DIRECTORY: An ORGANIZED (maybe by business types or areas) LIST of OBJECTS (people, businesses) and their ATTRIBUTES (names, telephone numbers, street addresses e.t.c) in a LOCAL AREA ACTIVE DIRECTORY: An ORGANIZED (Ous, Containers e.t.c) LIST of OBJECTS (users, computers, e.t.c) and their ATTRIBUTES (names, emails, depts e.t.c) in a LOCAL AREA (Domain/Forest)

Where Did It Come From?

1988: ITU + ISO comes together to create X.500 standard (Active Directory is based on the X.500 standard). X.500 defined a protocol DAP (Direct Access Protocol) which is used by systems to connect to X.500 directories DAP is very complex and it uses the OSI stack. A group headed by the University of Michigan started work to solve this problem and they created LDAP which simplified connections to X.500 directories.

Where Did It Come From? The Microsoft Connection

YEAR 1980s 1988 1990 1993 NAME MS-NET LAN Manager Windows NT 3.0 Windows NT 3.1 DESCRIPTION Used with MS-DOS Used with OS/2 version 1.1 which is developed with IBM NOS and OS Integrated together. Domain concept introduced Increased stability

1996
1997

Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 5.0 beta 1

Added the Windows 95 GUI

NOS completely redesigned. LDAPv3 implemented

1998
1999 2000

Windows NT 5.0 beta 2

Windows 2000 beta 3 Windows 2000

Summary
Understanding the history of any technology is important to understanding the philosophy behind it and it can help to guide you in your design decisions
ACTIVE DIRECTORY AT ITS SIMPLEST IS A DIRECTORY!! Only with more features The X.500 series was released in 1988 but it was very complex to implement with its protocols based on the OSI stack LDAP was developed to make it easier to connect to X.500 directories using the TCP/IP stack and it was a lightweight version of the DAP The final version of LDAP, version 3 was released in 1997 Microsofts Active Directory was first released in 1997. It is not an X.500 directory but it uses the X.500 information model and it uses LDAPv3 as its access protocol

Recommended Reading
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Active Directory: Designing, Deploying and Running Active Directory (5th Edition) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_Manager

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/196455
http://www.microsoft.com/enus/download/confirmation.aspx?id=30734 http://www.novell.com/connectionmagazine/2000/11/madn0.pdf

THANK YOU FOR WATCHING!!! SEE YOU IN LESSON 2: FUNDAMENTALS OF ACTIVE DIRECTORY