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July 31, 2026
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BeyondTrust Communications
Community Manager

Active Directory best practices

Before taking any actions with Active Directory, review these best practices carefully.

AD Bridge Cells provide a means of directly managing Unix identities in Active Directory. Best practices are to use Cells rather than Unprovisioned mode wherever possible.

This is so a user’s Unix group membership can be limited to less than 16 groups when required for NFS (or 32 groups for Solaris) without impacting normal Windows group membership management practices.

Directory Integrated mode

After installing the AD Bridge tools, the first determination that must be made regards Directory Integrated or ID Range. Directory Integrated Mode is strongly preferred.

This causes all lookups to use indexed attributes in AD, lowering the cost of each lookup against the AD domain controller (DC). Windows 2012 Forest Mode forests with Windows 2012 R2 domain controllers can be transitioned to Directory Integrated Mode without extending the AD Schema.

Cell design

AD Bridge Cells allows managing overlapping Unix identities within a single Active Directory organization for AD Bridge. There are two possible cell structures:

Named Cells store Unix identity information (uid, uidNumber, gidNumber, gecos, unixHomeDirectory, logonShell) in a subcontainer of an associated Organizational Unit (OU). Users can come from the local domain or a trusted domain, but their Unix identity data is always stored in the domain where the computer is joined.
Default Cell is a single, enterprise-wide cell that spans all trusted Microsoft Active Directory Global Catalogs. Individual AD domains opt in by creating a Default Cell object at their domain root. Unix identity information is stored alongside the user object it belongs to, enforcing one Unix identity per AD user across the enterprise. The Default Cell is the authoritative source for Unix identity information.

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BeeKeepers Community

AD Bridge Agent Installation without restarting the server
“Hi community, I'm deploying AD Bridge in a production environment, and the client has a high-availability infrastructure where server restarts are not permitted. Is it possible to install the AD Bridge agent without requiring a server reboot after the installation?”

Reply: “A reboot necessarily isn’t required for AD Bridge, and isn’t listed in the documentation. However, when testing, first install ADB, join the domain, and test logging in, etc. **before a reboot** to ensure that the connection works as expected. Reboots can validate everything continues to work as expected.
That said, I always recommend checking in with our professional services teams if you are unsure in a Production environment to ensure migrations and any gotchas can be found early”.

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