DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Integrating with Active Directory

“The face is what one goes by, generally,” Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.

With the release of Windows 2000, Microsoft replaced the Windows NT Security Account Manager (SAM) with Active Directory (AD), which serves as the repository for information about users, groups, computers, and other network resources. In contrast to the SAM, Active Directory is built on several well-known standards including the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for accessing and manipulating data, Kerberos for authentication, and—you guessed it—DNS for name resolution.

In fact, using DNS for name resolution is one of the major improvements of Active Directory over Windows NT, which relied on the Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS). Microsoft made the decision to develop WINS in the early days of Windows NT because, at the time, DNS did not support dynamic update capability, which Microsoft needed for its clients. As a result, many companies had to implement both services: DNS for standard Internet-based name resolution and WINS for the Windows NT environment. This often pitted the NT administrators against the DNS administrators because of the need to maintain two separate namespaces. Over time, dynamic update support was added to DNS, and WINS failed to garner industry support—in no small part because it was a proprietary Microsoft offering.

Even with the opportunity to get rid of WINS, migrating to Active Directory hasn’t always resulted in a ...