But even if you don??™t, you
needn??™t worry too much, since this chapter begins with a cursory review of
Active Directory before it dives into the new stuff. If you??™re a pro, you can gladly skip a
few sections to get to the real meat.
Windows Server 2008 adds some new functionality to Active Directory as well as an
introduction of a concept called a read-only domain controller. If you??™ve administered a
Windows NT 4.0 network, the first question that probably comes to your mind is ???Isn??™t
that the same as a backup domain controller???? The answer is yes, and no??”but we??™ll get
into that later. What you need to know for now is that Active Directory has evolved and
matured significantly since its inception with Windows 2000 Server, and this iteration
has a potential for higher availability and recoverability than ever before.
THE BIRTH AND EVOLUTION OF ACTIVE DIRECTORY
When Microsoft got serious about stepping into the backend enterprise computing market
in the mid-1990s, the company needed a product that provided some kind of a centralized
store to house user, group, and computer account information for Windows NT. It had to
be easy to administer and fairly scalable and robust. From that idea came the Windows
NT domain model??”a predominantly NetBIOS-driven, simple (in terms of functionality),
and centralized authentication store. As major enterprises began rolling out this product,
they realized that the Windows NT domain model, although fairly scalable on paper, was
a nightmare to manage in real life.
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