Introduction
Active Directory supports several important industry standards, which
allow other services and platforms to interoperate and integrate with
it. The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is the
standards-based protocol used by all major directory service vendors
for directory access and management. LDAP is platform neutral, which
means you can access and manage data in Active Directory from a
variety of platforms. Active Directory uses the Domain Name System
(DNS) for its name resolution services so you can use tools, such as
nslookup, to locate domain controllers by making
DNS queries. Kerberos is the most widely used network authentication
protocol and is supported by Active Directory, so even
non-Windows-based Kerberos-enabled clients can authenticate. These
are just a few of the standards Active Directory supports. Throughout
this chapter I will cover how you can access, manage, and integrate
Active Directory in ways that are not typically documented.
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