What is a directory server?

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From the course by Google

System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services

2837 ratings

Google

System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services

2837 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Google IT Support Professional Certificate

This course will transition you from working on a single computer to an entire fleet. Systems administration is the field of IT that’s responsible for maintaining reliable computers systems in a multi-user environment. In this course, you’ll learn about the infrastructure services that keep all organizations, big and small, up and running. We’ll deep dive on cloud so that you’ll understand everything from typical cloud infrastructure setups to how to manage cloud resources. You'll also learn how to manage and configure servers and how to use industry tools to manage computers, user information, and user productivity. Finally, you’ll learn how to recover your organization’s IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster. By the end of this course you’ll be able to: ● utilize best practices for choosing hardware, vendors, and services for your organization. ● understand how the most common infrastructure services that keep an organization running work, and how to manage infrastructure servers. ● understand how to make the most of the cloud for your organization. ● manage an organization’s computers and users using the directory services, Active Directory, and OpenLDAP. ● choose and manage the tools that your organization will use. ● backup your organization’s data and know how to recover your IT infrastructure in the case of a disaster. ● utilize systems administration knowledge to plan and improve processes for IT environments.

From the lesson

Directory Services

In the fourth week of this course, we'll learn about directory services. Specifically, we'll cover how two of the most popular directory services, Active Directory and OpenLDAP, work in action. We'll explore the concept of centralized management and how this can help SysAdmins maintain and support all the different parts of an IT infrastructure. By the end of this module, you will know how to add users, passwords, and use group policies in Active Directory and OpenLDAP.

Module Introduction0:50

What is a directory server?4:24

Implementing Directory Services2:46

Meet the Instructors

Google

Have you ever looked up someone's phone number in a phone directory?

Or use a directory listing at a shopping mall to find a specific store?

A directory server essentially provides the same functionality.

A directory server contains a lookup service that provides

mapping between network resources and then network addresses.

It's used to organize and look up

organizational objects and entities ranging from things like user accounts,

user groups, telephone numbers, and network shares.

Instead of managing user accounts and computer information locally on every machine,

all that information can be stored on a directory server for easy access and management.

The ideal enterprise quality directory server should support replication.

This means that the store directory data can be copied and distributed across a number of

physically distributed servers but still

appear as one unified data store for querying and administering.

Why is replication important?

It provides redundancy by having multiple servers available simultaneously.

So there'll be minimal disruption to the service

in the event that one of server explodes.

Replication also decreases latency when you access the directory service.

By having replicas of your directory server located in each office,

you're able to answer directory service queries more quickly.

The directory service should also be flexible,

allowing you to easily create new object types as your needs change.

Access to the information stored in

the directory server database should be accessible from

a variety of OS types and from the designated areas of the corporate network.

Directory services are useful for

organizing data and making it searchable for an organization.

This is achieved through the use of a hierarchal model of objects and containers.

The containers are referred to as organizational units or OUs,

and they can contain objects or more organizational units.

This is similar in organizational structure to a file system.

OUs are like folders which can contain

individual files or objects for a directory service.

OUs can also contain additional folders.

The management benefits of this structure are pretty clear.

Can you imagine trying to keep your music library

organized if there was no such thing as suborders?

Crazy. This hierarchal structure can be used to

convey additional information about what's stored within.

Take your directory structure as an example.

You may have an OU code users which contains all user accounts.

Within this OU, there could be additional OUs

which represent the actual team structure of your organization.

The user's OU could contain additional OUs like sales, engineering,

marketing which include the user account objects

for the individuals that belong to these current teams.

This structure can be used to convey differences between these sub-OU sub-users.

For example, we could influence stricter password requirements for

members of engineering without affecting sales or marketing.

Submembers inherit their characteristics of their parent OU.

So any changes made to the higher level user's OU would affect all sub-OUs,

including sales, marketing, and engineering.

Someone with the responsibilities of a systems administrator,

whether that's a system admin or I.T.

support specialist, would be responsible for the set up,

configuration, and maintenance of the territory server.

This includes the OS itself on which the directory service would run.

Standard OS management tasks are involved here,

like ensuring that updates are installed and configuring standard services.

Other responsibilities include the installation

and configuration of the directory service itself.

So installing the service and configuring any related services.

If multiple servers are used in a replication setup,

this needs to be configured, too.

It's very likely that the hierarchy in overall structure of

the directory itself would also be up to business admin to design and implement.

Well, that covers the high level overview of what exactly a director service is.

We'll dive deep into more specific details later in this course.

But for now, let's review some of the concepts we just covered with a short quiz.

Then list me back at the next video where we'll do

a more detailed rundown on how to implement directory services.

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