Something I often recommend to my customers is keep the membership of the Enterprise Admins and Schema Admins groups empty and only populate them (temporarily) when required. The privileges assigned to these groups are obviously high and removing the members reduces the potential for costly mistakes and/or compromise. Here’s a quick Powershell snippet that will… Read More: How to clear group membership with Powershell »
Many organisations choose to rename the Built-in Administrator account for the domain for security reasons. Whether or not renaming the account provides any real protection is the matter of some debate. What is clear is that any hacker worth his or her salt is not going to be fooled by the rename, because the account… Read More: How to find the renamed domain Built-In Administrator account with… »
On and off over the past couple of days I’ve been trialling one of Quest’s cloud services – OnDemand Recovery for AD. The other service that Quest currently offers in the Microsoft space is Log Management, which allows the collection, storage and forensic analysis of Windows Event Log data. For those of you familiar… Read More: Quest OnDemand Recovery for AD »
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about using Quest’s ActiveRoles Quick Connect Express for Exchange 2010 Global Address List synchronisation (GAL Sync). Since then I’ve written a step-by-step guide which will hopefully help others who want to use this very useful freeware utility. You can download the guide (pdf format) here: GAL Sync with ActiveRoles Quick… Read More: Quest ActiveRoles Quick Connect Express: GAL Sync Step-by-step Guide »
10 years ago today I started ActiveDir.org and the AD discussions mailing list is still going strong! Thanks to everyone who has made it a success over the years and especially to Martin Tuip who helped me get set up and Matty Holland who does all the development work. It makes me feel quite old!
Many moons ago I provided a CSV file containing 200 sample AD user accounts together with instructions on how to use CSVDE to import the accounts into AD. I often use these sample accounts in lab environments and for presentations. I thought it would be fun to write a small powershell script to read the… Read More: Bulk create sample AD users from CSV file using Powershell »
Quest has just released a freeware product called Quick Connect Express for Active Directory. If you’re looking for something that fills the gap left by the (now pensionable) Microsoft Identity Integration Feature Pack, then this may well be it. I’ve spent the last day looking at the product’s capabilities for running Exchange 2010 Global Address… Read More: GAL Sync with Quest Quick Connect Express for Active Directory »
I had always been under the impression that the custom attributes introduced by the Exchange schema extensions were handy for all sorts of things. Earlier this week I discovered that there are hidden dangers when using them for anything other than Exchange-related purposes. When you prepare the schema for Exchange you will see, amongst others,… Read More: Exchange Extension Attributes – A Cautionary Tale »
After my Teched break-out session yesterday I was asked if I could share the PS command dictionary file that I used to support my demos. Here it is (right-click Save Target As): CommandDictionary.psd1 For those of you that weren’t there the PS commands mostly relate to working with the AD Recycle Bin feature of Windows… Read More: Teched 2010 New Zealand – Powershell command dictionary file »
As part of a recent domain migration, I had to convert a number of linked mailboxes to standard “user” mailboxes. The well known method for converting linked mailboxes is to disconnect the mailbox, change the type and then reconnect. This is fine you just have a few linked mailboxes to deal with, but not if… Read More: Powershell script to bulk convert linked mailboxes »