Mastering Active Directory - Second Edition

Distinguished names

Distinguished names in Active Directory can also be used to uniquely identify an object. This is very similar to the way your postal address works. A postal address uses a hierarchical path to uniquely identify you. Starting from the country, it goes to province, then to the city, street, and house number. In the same way, using the full path to the object within the directory will help you uniquely identify an object.

There are three types of Active Directory naming attributes that have been used to generate distinguishing names:

• organizationName (O) or organizationalUnitName (OU): Organization represents the root-level domain. The OU is where the object is located.
• domainComponent (DC): This is the naming attribute ...