Service Instantiation

A specific service can publish itself one or more times in Active Directory. Each instance of the service running on a computer or computers on the network can create connection point objects in Active Directory. A connection point represents one or more instances of a service that is available in a network.

For example, if a service such as Microsoft Certificate Services for Windows 2000 is installed and running on two computers on the network, there can be two connection point objects — one for the instance of the service on each computer. Similarly, a service with multiple instances installed on a single computer can create separate connection point objects for each instance. It is also possible for multiple instances of a replicated service to publish themselves using a single connection point in Active Directory. In this case, the connection point contains information that enables a client to select and bind to a replica.

Note

The possSuperiors attribute and systemPossSuperiors attribute of each Active Directory object class contain a list of the object classes that can contain instances of the object — that is, the types of containers in which you can create the object. After creation of the class, the systemPossSuperiors attribute cannot be modified, and for an existing classSchema object, values can be added to the possSuperiors attribute, but they cannot be removed. For example, you can create an instance of the serviceConnectionPoint object class as a child of a Computer , Container, or Organization-Unit object. For more information on the possSuperiors attribute and systemPossSuperiors attribute, see "Active Directory Schema" in this book.