Skip to main content

Ensuring all OU's are protected from Accidental Deletion - AD Cmdlets

A new tick box was included in Active Directory Users and computer with Windows server 2008 - the ability to block the deletion of an object even if the user has admin rights to that object.  Looking behind the scenes at what that tick box does is actually add a Deny permission to the ACL of the object for you. 

Without the AD management pack, when trying to script this to ensure all OU's are protected, you cannot check for this tickbox - You have to enumerate the permissions and verify all (yes, there is more than 1 permission added) exist.  Consequently, to 'tick' the box by a script, you have to add all the permissions which can be complicated.  I have managed to do this but it got too deeply involved in .net to be a simple solution.

In the advent of the AD management pack for powershell though, life is made quite a lot simpler.  The following (one-liner!) will do the job for you.

Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -filter {*} -searchbase (get-adrootdse).defaultnamingcontext -prop ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion | where {$_.ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion -eq $false} | Set-ADOrganizationalUnit -ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion $true

So, to break it down:
 Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -filter {*} gets all OU's.
-searchbase (get-adrootdse).defaultnamingcontext  uses the get-adrootdse command to return the naminig context.  The searchbase for the Get-ADOrganizationalUnit command is then populated with this data
-prop ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion enure you return the ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion attribute 
 | where {$_.ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion -eq $false} pass through to where-object filter and only accept OU's where the setting is false
| Set-ADOrganizationalUnit -ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion $true pass through the filters set to enable the setting.

You might be thinking 'why not set the filter in the first line to 'ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion -eq $false' rather than passing through to a where-oject?  The response when trying to do this was :

Get-ADOrganizationalUnit : Searching on extended attribute 'ProtectedFromAccidentalDeletion' is not supported.

Now we can live with the peace of mind that all our OU's cannot be deleted accidentally!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Enable Powershell Remoting (WinRM) via Group Policy

I have been doing some testing on enabling WinRM via group policy, being that WinRM is the service that Powershell v2 sets up it remoting capabilities. Here are the GPO settings that you need to configure WinRM .... set the winrm service to auto start Computer Configuration \ Policies \ Windows Settings \ Security Settings \ System Services Windows Remote Management (WS-Management)  set Startup Mode to Automatic start the service incorporated in to the above - you may need a restart. create a winrm listener Computer Configuration / Policies / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Remote Management (WinRM) / WinRM Service / Allow automatic configuration of listeners IPv4 filter: * * is listen on all addresses, or if you only want a particular IP address to respond use an iprange eg 10.1.1.1-10.1.1.254 - don't forget that this IP range has to be valid for all hosts that fall in the scope of the GPO you are creating.  You can use 1...
2 comments
Read more

Assigning Permissions - AGDLP

AGDLP It seems I have been mildly distracted away from the title of this blog site.   It does say AD Admin, but I seem to have been taken away by file system stuff.   I have to say, it has all been worthwhile, but it’s probably time I got back to the real heart of what I do. There are probably a million permission assigning advice pages, but I thought I would put another one out there after referring to AGDLP in my last post. So, what is this all about – AGDLP.   Well, it is something I learned in my MCSE 2003 studies and has become ingrained into my ideals since.   As a contractor, I get to move job often.   This enables me to forge opinions on how to configure things in a domain, and more importantly how NOT to configure things. AGDLP is definitely on the to do list…for anyone in any size domain or forest, as it follows some very basic principals.   I will explain these whilst I go through what AGDPL stands for. A A is for...
2 comments
Read more

Finding out what 'SearchFlags' are set on you AD attributes

Whilst doing some research into indexed attributes, I posted this  a while back on how to find your index attributes.  Since then, I have looked a little deeper into what indexing really means and found this excellent explanation on the numbers that can be found in the searchflags attribute of a schema object. Using Florian’s reference, I built the following script (which is both powershell v1 and v2 compatible) to get the schema attributes from the forest schema and return (among other things) the breakdown of your attributes search flags. $forest = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.forest]::getcurrentforest() $schema = [ADSI]('LDAP://CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,dc=' + ($($forest).name -replace "[.]",",dc=")) $attributes = $schema.psbase.children | where {$_.objectClass -eq "attributeSchema"} $collection = @() foreach ($attr in $attributes){ $store = "" | select "Name","lDAPDisplayName","singlev...
2 comments
Read more