What in the world are RIDs for anyways?!

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So the question came up today. ‘We know what the RID master does with his Pools of RID numbers etc., but what are the RIDs then used for?’

Relative Identifier Allocation

Short and Simple is this.. On a regular stand-alone machine, creating absolutely unique ID numbers for an object that gets created is easy, since it only matters to the one local machine. However, in an environment like Active Directory where we usually have many machines that are all writing to the same database of objects and then replicating it gets a bit stickier. The RID Master issues pools of RIDs, 500 at a time, and keeps track of who has which pool of numbers to prevent creating the same SID for two different objects.