Most of us corporate application developers are subject to the boundaries of corporate networks and this is a good thing since we have our security and authentication infrastructure being taken care of by the IT security people, just like the databases are taken care of by DBA’s. Long time ago, we had to either maintain our own or provide users ways to manage their own application access credentials.
With Apache authenticating against Active Directory (AD), not anymore!
AD is a directory service created by Microsoft for Windows domain networks using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). It is included in most Windows Server operating systems.
An AD domain controller authenticates and authorizes all users and computers in a Windows domain type network