Unfortunately Active Directory doesn’t yet provide dynamic security groups in the way that, for example, Exchange provides dynamic distribution groups. Sometimes it is useful to maintain a group’s membership based on a specific attribute, or set of attributes. Here’s a quick Powershell example that shows how to maintain the membership based on the presence of… Read More »
You now have the ability to provide product feature requests and changes relating to Windows Server that go direct to the Product Group. Not only that, but you can build a base of voter support to drive your suggestions across the line. windowsserver.uservoice.com I really like this concept as it removes the difficulties associated with getting your… Read More »
This article explains how to link your O365 tenant to an existing Microsoft Azure subscription, so that you can manage your O365 users from within Azure. Why would you want to do this? Well, perhaps you just want to centralise your administration functions, but it also gives you other benefits, such as the ability to… Read More »
The smartphone I had before I bought my Nokia Lumia 930 was a Samsung S3. I changed phones after the S3 got run over by a car (a short, but dull, cautionary tale not worth relating here). The client I was working for at the time I still had the S3 had a BYOD option… Read More »
It seems that a couple of weeks ago my standalone Exchange Online Protection (EOP) configuration was changed without me being involved. Basically, it looks like my default Accepted Domain was changed from type “Internal Relay” to “Authoritative” without my knowledge or consent. The first I knew of this was when I noticed my on-premises mail… Read More »
The default location for newly provisioned user and computer objects are (respectively) the Users and Computers containers. Since Windows Server 2003 Active Directory the option has been available to redirect these to OUs that you specificy. Why would you want to do this? Well, the Users and Computers containers are just that – container objects… Read More »
There are well known methods for setting Access Control Entries (ACEs) on Active Directory objects using Powershell. One example is the following: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adpowershell/archive/2009/10/13/add-object-specific-aces-using-active-directory-powershell.aspx The method relies on you knowing the schemaIDGUID of the schema object classes you are working with (e.g. User, Computer, Group). Unless you know your way around AD it’s not… Read More »
I recently had a interesting issue where I was seeing the 1121 error below in the Application log on one of my Exchange 2013 servers every minute. Log Name: Application Source: MSExchange Mailbox Replication Date: 14/01/2015 2:23:34 p.m. Event ID: 1121 Task Category: Request Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: ex1.contoso.com Description: The… Read More »
Another quick one to finish the year off. Here’s a script that runs an LDAP query against all of the DCs in the forest and reports back the time it has taken for each. The intention is to identify any DCs that are responding slowly for some reason. In the example below, I’ve chosen to… Read More »
I came across a weird error the other day while running Exchange Server 2013 CU6 setup with the /PrepareAD switch. The error (from the Exchange setup logs) was this: [12/02/2014 01:14:16.0727] [2] [ERROR] Could not find the Exchange Mailbox Administrators Universal Security Group through its well-known GUID 29a962c2-91d6-4ab7-9e06-8728f8f842ea. Please make sure that Setup /prepareAD has… Read More »