For those of you planning to extend your AD DS or AD LDS schema, you will need to find a unique object identifier (OID) for each new schema class and attribute. The process by which you can acquire the OIDs is described by Microsoft here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms677619(v=vs.85).aspx In summary, Microsoft suggests two methods for obtaining an… Read More »
I’ve been having a look at the free ADManager Plus software from the team at ManageEngine. The product is designed to simplify AD management and provide useful reports. It falls under the category of “freemium” software whereby the basic offering is free, but premium features incur a licence cost. There are three variants available: Standard… Read More »
I recently came across an old blog post by fellow MVP Joe Richards. In the post Joe points out that whenChanged is not a replicated attribute, which makes it a poor candidate for accurately determining when an object was last modified. He does however indicate that the whenChanged attribute provides a handy way to report… Read More »
There has been a lot of discussion around the poor quality of the recently released Apple maps app. To be fair, Apple has taken a disproportionate amount of flak for this, given that the majority of their apps tend to reasonably solid when released. The whole maps affair seems to have overshadowed negative reaction to… Read More »
Here’s something I put together to handle bulk certificate requests for submission to an Enterprise CA using certreq.exe. Enjoy! ######################################################### # # Name: Request-Certificates.ps1 # Author: Tony Murray # Version: 1.0 # Date: 4/12/2012 # Comment: PowerShell script to submit certificate # requests in bulk using certreq.exe # ######################################################### # Specify the location of the… Read More »
If you’re familiar with LDAP searches you will probably at some point have been frustrated at the inability to exclude objects in a specific Organisational Unit, i.e “Give me all User objects in the domain, except those in the Sales OU”. To workaround the problem you typically need to do some scripting. There are several… Read More »
Something you may have noticed in your journey on the road to AD enlightenment is that if you deploy a new Microsoft Enterprise Certificate Authority (CA) and publish the default templates, your Domain Controllers will automatically enroll for a certificate. The template used is the DomainController V1 certificate, which has been around since Windows 2000… Read More »
If you come across this error when using Powershell to delete an object, it is most likely because the object has child objects associated with it. The most obvious example is computer objects that have print queue, service connection point, RRAS or various other types of child objects. The workaround is to determine the child… Read More »
Recently I was doing some testing with a new Exchange 2010 Receive Connector and wanted a method to check how many messages it was processing. I came up with the following Powershell snippet that seems to work well. $i = 0 do { $now = get-date (Get-MessageTrackingLog -ResultSize unlimited -Start “11/10/2012 3:00PM” -End $now -Server… Read More »
It is sometimes helpful to be able to search for objects in AD by their creation date. The whenCreated attribute is useful for this as it is a replicated attribute (i.e. is consistent across all DCs). The challenge for using whenCreated in LDAP filters is the syntax. The attribute uses the GeneralizedTime syntax to represent… Read More »