Roy's musings

I was desperately searching for good books on LDAP, both for understanding as well as programming. I came across the Redbooks web site of IBM, where they maintain an impressive collection of good eBooks. What is more, most of the books can be downloaded in pdf form free of cost. I downloaded and started reading Understanding LDAP book.

Many a times I have wondered how some of the sites have an icon appearing before their URL in the address bar. But for some reason there is no icon appearing if I visit my personal page. I recently figured the answer for this while visiting this site . There was a side note appearing in that site, taking me to the Microsoft's article on how to make this icon appear. Hope you would find this useful and interesting. Apart from that, I find ZYTRAX site extremely useful in many ways. They have excellent tutorials on LDAP and DNS. There is a lot more to read about from that site.

I am new to Windows world. Hence please do correct me if you find any terminology to be incorrect than the standard ones. I would be more than glad to stand corrected. I am learning about the LDAP and Active Directory servers. We all know that for logging into a domain, active directory (AD) service for that domain is used. But how does the windows running in your workstation find out which AD to be contacted? After we click on the login button, a name service look-up is performed with the following details: Request type: SRV URL: _ldap._tcp.domainname This NS look-up command will return a bunch of servers, and one of them will be used to authenticate the user. Each of the blocks in the response will have the port in which the server is listening as well. Replace domainname above with the actual domain name in which you would like to find out the active servers. Okay, thats the theory part. Now hands on. Try these commands in your workstation and convince yourself with the results...