* Reflections while tending the AD orchard
A couple of weeks ago I touted HP’s Wook Lee and his appearance at NetPro’s Directory Experts Conference, which took place in Vancouver last week. If you were at the conference, but overslept and missed Lee’s 8 a.m. presentation, then you should hang your head. Lee outdid himself with a tour de force which included haiku, tributes to Joyce Kilmer and Robert Frost, an irreverent rendition of the theme from the Beverly Hillbillies and, oh yes, a fascinating presentation on how to best handle the care and feeding of Active Directory.
At last year’s conference, Lee’s presentation “The Adventures of an Active Directory Forest Ranger” took the tack that maintaining a healthy AD forest was similar to maintaining a healthy National Forest Service forest. But as he explained last Tuesday, further reflection led him to believe that a more active management plan was needed. This led to this year’s presentation, “Reflections while tending the AD orchard.”
An orchard requires a great deal of hands-on work: the ground must be carefully prepared, the trees planted in orderly rows. But the trees can’t be allowed to grow unfettered – they must be pruned and clipped with deadwood and underbrush removed constantly. A large group of people, each specialists in their own right, are employed to care for and maintain different aspects of the orchard, including the harvesting of the fruit just as different people are delegated to take care of different aspects of your directory environment, including the harvesting of your data. As Lee put it, “Orchards are about doing things in a standard way, rows of trees all about the same height, trimmed and pruned to similar shapes. It makes for lower operating costs and generally better security because things are done in a consistent fashion.” That makes more sense than the wild diversity of a forest.
Pruning is necessary for both the orchard and your directory, Lee points out: “Examples of pruning are removing terminated employees and contractors, deleting empty groups, deleting application/service specific attributes and objects when an app/service is retired, disabling features such as link tracking, and removing objects related to business reorganizations and divestitures.”
And finally, it’s not the benevolent National Park Service overseeing your forest, but the Food and Drug Administration – with all of its regulatory baggage – that’s looking over your shoulder as you tend your orchard and process your fruit.
There was a lot more in his presentation that I hope to be able to show you in its entirety soon. But there is something else he touched on and it was some hardware benchmarks that might open an eye or two. I’ll get to those in the next issue.
