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active-directorydomaincontrolleractivedirectorymembership

What does adding a PC to Domain Controller actually do?

I am wondering what adding a PC to a windows domain actually does? For example, if after issuing, 

sudo net ADS JOIN -U 'unixJOINer%JOINpwd' ....

How does the Domain controller from then on know which PC is tied to which account (on the domain controller).

  • Does it take into consideration the PC's IP-address/MAC-address
  • and/or Does the PC need to cooperate continuously for some challenge response with a token?

I hope this is similar between Samba and Windows, but if context is needed, I would like to know how this works between a samba PC (client) with a Microsoft Domain controller (Windows server 2012).

My goal is to be able to spin up a VM from a fresh state, but possibly with a different IP, but without having to manually re-add the that specific instance of the VM to the domain controller.

Solution

  • Each computer joined to the domain has its own account and password, just like user accounts. So a computer logs in the same way a user does. They also (normally) change their passwords every 30 days.

    Here's some reading on that: