Jason Yoder, MCT

  On occasion, you may have misplaced your documentation on which ports AD LDS is listening on.  We have all “misplaced” our documentation before.  Open a command prompt with administrative privileges on the server hosting the AD LDS instance. Type dsdbutil “li I” q and press Enter In the above image, you can see both the LDAP port and the secure LDAP port being used by the AD LDS instance.

You will need to be logged in as an administrator (or elevate your privilege level) to complete this task. First you need to register your Schema snap in before we can use it. Click Start. Type cmd and press Enter . Type regsvr32 schmmgmt.dll and press Enter . Click OK when prompted. Type Exit and press Enter . Click Start , type MMC and press Enter . Click File and then click Add\Remove Snap-ins Click Active Directory Schema and then click Add Click OK Right click Active Directory Schema and then click Change Active Directory Domain Controller… Click  Type a Directory Server name[:port]here; Type the DNS name, NetBIOS name, or IP address of the server hosting the AD LDS instance.  In this example, the server name is MCT-1 . Now click on the enter you just made in the Change Directory Server window and then click OK . You can now view the classes and attributes of your AD LDS instance.

AD LDS allows you to provide directory services to applications that are free of the confines of Active Directory.  To list all the AD LDS instances on a server, follow this procedure: Log into the server in question Open a command prompt. Type dsdbutil and press Enter Type List Instances and press Enter . You will receive a list of the instance name, both the LDAP and SSL port numbers, the location of the database, and its status.

You can expand the functionality of the AD Recycle Bin to your Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) deployments.  This example assumes that we have an AD LDS instance called ‘ App1 ’. It will be on a server called ‘ MCT-1 ’ in a domain called ‘ MCTNET.com ’. We can attach to it on port 53414.  The application partition is ‘ CN=App1,DC=MCTNET,DC=COM ’ On the server hosting the AD LDS instance, open PowerShell. First verify that your Forest functional level is Windows Server 2008 R2. Type Get AD-Forest and press enter.  You can see from the results below that we are at the correct forest functional level. Open a command prompt with administrative credentials. Change your directory to c:\Windows\Adam . Type Ldifde.exe –i –f MS-ADAM-Upgrade-2.ldf –s MCT-1:53414 –b administrator MCTNET Pa$$w0rd –j . –$ adamschema.cat For your environment replace:   MCT-1 with the name of your server. 53414 with the port number of the AD LDS instance ...

Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services allow you to create a directory service that allows applications to have access to user accounts, groups, and authentication similar to Active Directory Domain Services.  The big advantage here is that the schema of the directory service will not be bound by the rules of an Active Directory database.  Exchange 2007/2010, for example, use an instance of AD LDS on the Edge Transport Server to provide for user authentication from the internet.  Because your Active Directory database is not exposed to the internet, this is more secure. Applications will handle most of the dirty work should they require AD LDS.  You may want to make sure the database is being backed up and also have a restore plan in place.  Should the database become corrupt, the application that uses that database will fail.  This document will walk you through backing up and restoring an instance of AD LDS using the dsdbutil.exe command. Fi...