Adam's AD Admin

UPDATED: now supports Quest tools see v0.92 update for details It's been a while since I have put anything on here, as noted by a few of my colleagues. I have been busy developing various ideas in PowerShell, and generally pulling together all the scripts, functions, features, techniques etc that I have learnt over the past few years.  This, and raising an ever growning young family! It has been a very exciting journey which is far from over, but I suppose I have come to a point where I feel I have something useful to give back. In my quest to automate AD management (one of the ideas I have been working on), I found that there isn't much in the way of Site / Subnet / Site link management in PowerShell. True, these are just objects in AD and can be referenced by get-ADobject or by the [ADSI] shortcut, or even the quest AD management tools, but formatting the configuration naming context with sub OU's is a pain - if you actually know that this is where sites and servic...

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...

Manage Shadow Group Membership - PowerShell Function I looked at a quick script to update a shadow group here , and then thought, this would make a good function. I have used my function template (refer to that post if you want to know more about how to format a function), to build up a reusable script to update group membership based on user and computer object location in AD. A traditional shadow group is all members of an OU. In my mind, there are a few assumptions to this statement. Being that you have taken the time to create an OU, put objects in it, and created a group to mirror those objects, you probably have only 1 type of object (i.e. user) and they are all similar in some respect (i.e. same office location). This function takes that in mind and only updates groups with users or computers - not other groups etc. Moving away from the traditional meaning of shadow group, I have added (for my own benefit as I required the functionality) a parameter to change the searchsco...

Manage Shadow Group Membership with powershell AD Cmdlets Sometimes, in our Active Directory structure, we need a group to reflect the contents of an OU. One example of this is If you organise you users and computers in location specific OU's and need to use RODC password replication policy. In this script I use PowerShell v2 AD cmdlets to enumerate group membership and OU membership and then use compare-object to work out the differences. Finally the switch reads if the additional user was found in the group or the OU and either adds or removed the member accordingly. This script uses get-aduser, but get-adcomputer will work just as well. I am wouking on a more comprehensive solution using get-adobject to deal with multiple object types. $Group = "shadowgroup" $OU = "OU=ShadowOU,DC=domain,DC=com" $users = $(get-aduser -SearchBase $OU -filter "*") $groupmembers = Get-ADGroupMember -Identity $Group switch (Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $gro...

AD Cmdlet Reference Link Use this quick link to list all my current and any future posts of the AD Cmdlet Reference series. Cheers!

Select-Object -expandproperty ... a time saver!!!! Have you ever run a powershell command and used select-object to filter the returned object?  If you have you will know that even if you only have one value in the select, you still have to refer to the property name to return the values.  Example : I want a list of all my enabled DC's PS C:\temp> $dcs = get-ADDomainController -filter {enabled -eq $True} | select HostName PS C:\temp> $dcs HostName -------- DC01.DOMAIN.COM DC02.DOMAIN.COM DC03.DOMAIN.COM DC04.DOMAIN.COM But to get to the first hostname I have to write this : $dcs[0].hostname If I were to use -expandproperty as below : PS C:\temp> $dcs = get-ADDomainController -filter {enabled -eq $True} | Select-Object -ExpandProperty hostname PS C:\temp> $dcs DC01.DOMAIN.COM DC02.DOMAIN.COM DC03.DOMAIN.COM DC04.DOMAIN.COM I now have an array of server names that I can simply push through a foreach, without the '.hostnam...

Enabling Powershell Remoting and Remote Administration - Windows 2008 R2 Server Core Following on from my post Enable WinRM via Group Policy , there as some follow on tasks to ensure server core is manageable via powershell and server manager. Add Firewall Rule To start with, to allow GUI remote management of the event viewer, another firewall rule needs to be added : Computer Configuration / Policies / Windows Settings / Security Settings / Windows Firewall with Advanced Security Create an Inbound Rule allowing the predefined group 'Remote Event Log Management' Install powershell and packs Next, as server core is the only version of Windows Server 2008 R2 that does not install Powershell V2 by default, we need to install powershell and which ever cmdlet management pack we need. In this case I am only going to install the server manager and AD cmdlets. Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup ServerManager-PSH-Cmdlets Winrs -...

Add-ADDomainControllerPasswordReplicationPolicy This cmdlet is there to manage the Password Replication Policy for RODC's.  A handy tool as without the AD management pack, you can only do this at the command line with repadmin! Example usage Add-ADDomainControllerPasswordReplicationPolicy -identity $RODC -AllowedList $group Define the parameters Both identity and AllowedList (also, DeniedList) take a range of identifiers for the object. These include "Distinguished Name", "GUID", "SID", and "samaccountname". As all the cmdlets have been designed for interoperability, I find it best to use output from other commands like get-aduser or in the case below, Get-ADDomainController. In a script In this script, I get every RODC, and firestly build a list of group names from the first 6 characters of the RODC name.  I then get the allowed list from the RODC and check my built list against the PRP entries.  For any that are not already memb...

Get-ADDomainController Get-ADDomainController is useful to easily return all, or a subset of your domain controllers.  This can be easily filtered by type, OS, AD Site, or a number of other values. Example usage #get all read only DC's Get-ADDomainController -filter {isreadonly -eq $true} # get the domain controller DC1 Get-ADDomainController -identity "DC1" # get the PDCE for the domain Get-ADDomainController -Discover -Service "PrimaryDC"} # get a GC but force it to rediscover (clear any cached DC) Get-ADDomainController -Discover -Service "GlobalCatalog" -ForceDiscover Define the parameters Identity takes a range of identifiers for the object. These include "Distinguished Name", "GUID", "SID", and "samaccountname". Service takes the following : PrimaryDC or 1 GlobalCatalog or 2 KDC or 3 TimeService or 4 ReliableTimeService or 5 ADWS or 6 Filter uses the format {isreadonly -eq $true...

Add-ADGroupMember Quite an easy one to start with, but quite handy too. Saves a few lines of code from ps1. Example usage Add-ADGroupMember -identity "Group name" -members "new group member" Add-ADGroupMember "Group name" "list of new group member" Define the parameters Both identity and members take a range of identifiers for the object. These include "Distinguished Name", "GUID", "SID", and "samaccountname". As all the cmdlets have been designed for interoperability, I find it best to use output from other commands like get-aduser. In a script #set the group name $Group = "All Managers" #get the objects that you want to add to the group (in this case, users with Manager in the description) $users = get-aduser -filter {description -like "*Manager*"} #Add the users to the group Add-ADGroupMember $Group $users Powershell without the Management pack How you gener...

AD Cmdlets reference Over the next few weeks, my aim is to add a reference to all the AD cmdlets that I am using and the equivilent Poswershell 1 code (or indeed powershell 2 without the AD management pack).  I am finding that I am doing a lot of conversion betweek the 2 versions at the moment and would find a quick reference handy, and if it is for anybody else, the great! First Cmdlet coming soon....any suggestions?

ADMGS - How to install on Server 2003 and Server 2008 From someone who has done a lot of AD related scripting in powershell v1, it has taken me a while to get to grips with using the new AD cmdlets in PowerShell v2.  Needless to say, I have started 'dipping my toe' into the vast 'sea of cmdlets' now available and am finding them quite useful.  So much so, that enabling the ability to use the cmdlets in my older domains has become essential.   I no longer want to have to write v1 and v2 scripts, or more specifically, ad cmdlet and non-ad-cmdlet enabled scripts.  Here enters the 'Active Directory Management Gateway Service'  .This provides the connectivity for the AD-cmdlets to communicate with a domain controller in your domain. Pre-requisites For a small installer, this guy need a fair few prerequisites - each OS version being slightly different. Windows 2008 (tested on 32bit) It is best that you have SP2 inst...

I have been fortunate enough to be involved in quite a large RODC deployment in a Windows 2008 domain. Even more fortunate is that we are currently upgrading this domain to R2 so I am getting the chance to try out the new powershell 2 AD cmdlets. I have been looking quite a lot into RODC operations, and the importance of the Password Replication Policy (PRP from now on) component has become increasingly more apparent. My first thoughts of PRP were entirely user based. "It allows users to logon to a remote site when the WAN link is down" was my impression. But, when a user logs on to a domain from a trusted computer, there is 2 parts to the authentication - user AND computer. Therefore it is just as important to add the computer objects to the allow PRP as it is the users. While you are there, add any server that is in the same site as the RODC as they will need to authenticate too. My preferred way of doing this create 3 groups and add them to the PRP policy : all users, al...