Question

Discuss Active Directory Trusts including 3 of the following (separated by semi-colons): Trust Relationships; One-Way and Two-Way Trusts; Transitive Trusts; Shortcut Trusts; Forest Trusts; External Trusts and Realm Trusts

Answer 1

Active Directory trusts helps to establish a pathway for connecting the domains from source to destination. It provides a path through trusts. It also provides permission to access the resources.

1. Trust Relationships (One Way and Two-Way Trusts): The trusts can establish relationships either in one-way or in two-way. In one-way, the domain X trusts domain Y. It means that X is considered as a trusting domain and Y is considered as a trusted domain. In this, in order to access any resources in other domain, it should be trusted domain. The resources accesses in one-way thus only trusted domain resources can be accesses and trusted domain cannot access resources of a trusting domain. In two-way trusts, it is not the case. The resources can be accessed by both trusted and trusting domains.

2. Transitive trusts: As the name suggests, the trust can be established to transitive domain. It is possible to extend the trust to other domain other than primary two domains (Trusting and Trusted).

3. Non-transitive trusts: As the name suggests, the trust can’t be established to transitive domain. It is not possible to extend the trust to other domain other than primary two domains (Trusting and Trusted).  For example, if domain A is connected to domain B, domain B is connected to domain C. It is not possible for domain A to access domain C. Transitive trusts cannot be established.

4. Shortcut trusts: It is like transitive trusts, but it is manually created by an administrator with the motto of reducing the total number of trusts a specific user needs to pass through from one domain to another domain. The shortcut trust is usually created when two domains communicate with each other in a regular interval.

5. Forest trust: It is a transitive trust in which two active directory forests can be linked together. Again, this is manually created by a system administrator. Both the forests should have Windows Server 2003 or higher configuration for this setup.

6. External Trust: It is a non-transitive trust which is mainly used for connecting to the trusts which does not able to connect to Forest trust due to configuration limitation. It is a one-way trust.

7. Realm Trust: It can be transitive, non-transitive, one-way or two-way. It is used to connecting to domains which are non-windows system.

Please do comment for any queries please