The ADUC Structure After the First DC Deployment
You promote your first domain controller, log in, open Active Directory Users and Computers for the first time, and stare at a small tree of folders. Some are familiar —…
Windows Server, Active Directory, and on-prem infrastructure
You promote your first domain controller, log in, open Active Directory Users and Computers for the first time, and stare at a small tree of folders. Some are familiar —…
Active Directory replicates almost everything in a multi-master model — create a user on DC2 and a few seconds later that object exists on DC1, DC3, and every other DC…
Most admins reach for Active Directory Users and Computers the moment someone joins the team — new user, new account, no question. Bringing a new computer into the domain feels…
Open compmgmt.msc on any Windows server or workstation, expand Local Users and Groups, click Groups, and you see roughly 20 built-in local groups staring back at you. Each one bundles…
Click the Advanced button on any folder’s Security tab and you land in a different world. The everyday permissions — Full Control, Modify, Read & Execute, Write — vanish, replaced…
Every Windows admin runs into the same question on a file server: “I gave the user Full Control on the Security tab — why can’t they delete the file?” The…
Every NTFS share, Active Directory OU, and file server eventually inherits the same mess: hundreds of access control entries that nobody can untangle, granted to people who left two years…
This is the hands-on authoritative restore walkthrough — the procedure Part 5 set up conceptually. We simulate a real disaster: an OU with users is deleted from DC01, the deletion…
Restoring a Domain Controller has two flavours. They use the same backup, the same DSRM boot path, the same wbadmin command — but a single decision afterward changes the entire…
The disaster: someone deleted the entire VM. Or the OS volume corrupted. Or a ransomware event encrypted the host. The procedure now is to bare-metal restore from the backup we…
An untested backup is not a backup. This post is the test. We’ll create a bare-metal backup of a disposable lab VM — not just system state, but the full…
Manual backups are practice. Scheduled backups are what actually saves you when a DC dies at 3 AM. Part 1 covered the one-shot system state backup; this post automates the…