What is Active Directory

Active directory (AD): The Microsoft alternative to directory services that offers customization and added features for the Windows platform

Group policy objects (GPO): The ways to manage the configuration of Windows machines, referring to the objects that represent things in your network that you want to be able to reference or manage

Active Directory Administrative Center (ADAC) - a tool that we’ll use for lots of everyday tasks Pasted image 20260702074056 Organizational units (OU): A hierarchical model of objects and containers that can contain objects or more organizational units

Forest: The hierarchy above a domain that contains multiple domains, allowing accounts to share resources between domains that are in the same forest

Domain controllers (DC): The service that hosts copies of the Active Directory database

DCs also serve as DNS service to provide name resolution and service discovery to clients
They provide central authentication through a network security protocol called Kerberos.
Domain controllers get to decide when computers and users can log onto the domain.
They also get to decide whether or not they have access to shared resources like file systems and printers
Some changes to the AD database can only be safely made by one DC at a time. We task those changes to a single domain controller by granting it a flexible single master operations also known as Flexible single-master operations (FSMO): The single domain controller that has been tasked with making changes to the AD database that can only be made by one DC at a time For more information about Active Directory, check out the link here.