Mastering™ Network Security, Second Edition

12.2. Active Directory

Although NT 4 provided a flat, nonextensible directory service, Active Directory (AD) provides a flexible, hierarchical, and expandable directory service. Active Directory is the directory service in Windows 2000. It's responsibility is to store information about each object within the network, enabling users to locate and manage printers, shared folders, files, and other objects throughout the organization. It facilitates a consistent way to name, describe, locate, access, manage, and secure information about distributed resources in an enterprise environment.

The information for each object is held in the AD database, which is the basis of the domain. Domains are named to correlate with DNS names, and when collected ...