Nesting Strategies for Riordan

Week 3

POS 421

May 9, 2011

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the nesting techniques used to classify users into groups using the scopes that are available in Windows Server. Nesting is when you add a group as a member to another group. This allows member accounts to be consolidated and reduces network traffic by preventing replication. User rights are inherited when you nest a group in another group. For example, if you make Group_A a part of Group_B then Group_A has all of the same permissions as Group_B.

There are several different types of accounts in Active Directory. User accounts are actual users of the system. Groups are users that are grouped based on function, department, need, etc. There are two categories for user accounts. They are domain user accounts and local user accounts. Local accounts are users that are on local computers and they are only able to have access to what the local computer allows. Local accounts cannot access any resource that is out of their particular domain. Domain user accounts can access any resource that is on their local system, as well as any group that the account is a member of.

User groups set and assign permissions for security and access to domain resources. Local groups are collections of local users on one server or computer, and their permissions only apply to that particular system. Domain local groups are collections of domain user accounts or groups with permissions that apply to the local domain.

Global groups contain user accounts and groups from the local domain. These groups have permission to access all domains within the Active Directory tree. Universal groups have users from any domain and have permissions of whatever the administrator wants to set. Riordan will not be using Universal groups for their network.

Riordan should incorporate domain local groups, global groups, and universal groups in Active Directory. The best way to think about user and group configurations is to...