For a non-Microsoft person, what is ADFS? ADFS is Microsoft’s solution for Single Sign On and web based authentication. It is used primarily to provide a single set of credentials that can access a variety of sites not necessarily hosted within the same domain. How does it differ to things like LDAP? LDAP: Communicates using … Read more
This has been a fun topic of discussion on Server Fault. There appear to be varying “religious views” on the topic. I agree with Microsoft’s recommendation: Use a sub-domain of the company’s already-registered Internet domain name. So, if you own foo.com, use ad.foo.com or some such. The most vile thing, as I see it, is … Read more
The ASP.NET Active Directory Membership Provider does an authenticated bind to the Active Directory using a specified username, password, and “connection string”. The connection string is made up of the LDAP server’s name, and the fully-qualified path of the container object where the user specified is located. The connection string begins with the URI LDAP://. … Read more
Absolutely. From a computer that’s a member of the domain, open a command-prompt and run a: NET GROUP “group name” /DOMAIN Unless your administrators have changed the stock permissions on the group object you will be able to view the membership that way. You can use AD Users and Computers even if you’re not an … Read more
What is Active Directory? Active Directory Domain Services is Microsoft’s Directory Server. It provides authentication and authorization mechanisms as well as a framework within which other related services can be deployed (AD Certificate Services, AD Federated Services, etc). It is an LDAP compliant database that contains objects. The most commonly used objects are users, computers, … Read more
try dsget group “CN=GroupName,DC=domain,DC=name,DC=com” -members
On any computer, that has DNS configured to use AD’s DNS server do: Start -> Run -> nslookup set type=all _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.DOMAIN_NAME Replace DOMAIN_NAME with the actual domain name e.g. example.com. Read more here.
Try running gpresult /R for RSoP summary or gpresult /V for verbose output from the command line as an administrator on the computer. It should output something like this: C:\Windows\system32>gpresult /V Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Operating System Group Policy Result tool v2.0 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1981-2001 Created On 2/10/2010 at 10:27:41 AM RSOP data … Read more
CN = Common Name OU = Organizational Unit DC = Domain Component These are all parts of the X.500 Directory Specification, which defines nodes in a LDAP directory. You can also read up on LDAP data Interchange Format (LDIF), which is an alternate format. You read it from right to left, the right-most component is … Read more
Importing a whole library seems inefficient when all you need is essentially two lines of code…