Techibee.com

This post helps you to understand how to query nested group members using powershell. The MS given ActiveDirectory powershell module doesn’t provide a direct way to get all the members part of a security group. This information is useful because you can know who all will get permissions granted to a particular security group if the security group has sub groups inside it. If there is just one or two levels of sub groups, then maybe we can spend time and write code for querying those groups as well by parsing their names. But how we can handle the situation where we don’t know how many sub groups the group we are querying has and how many levels are there?

To address this requirement I have written a small powershell function that helps you to get all direct and indirect members of a security group in active directory.

function Get-ADNestedGroupMembers {
[cmdletbinding()]
param (
[String] $GroupName
)            

import-module activedirectory
$Members = Get-ADGroupMember -Identity $GroupName
$members | % {
    if($_.ObjectClass -eq "group") {
        Get-ADNestedGroupMembers -GroupName $_.distinguishedName
    } else {
        return $_.distinguishedname
    }
}            

}

In this code I am using Get-ADGroupMember cmdlet which is part of activedirectory module. This code uses recursive function call to query group members when a sub group is found.

Usage:

Hope this helps… please feel free to post in comments section if you have any questions. This script can be enhanced to display objects of a particular type — for example, only computers, only users etc. I am doing it here …but let me know if you have the requirement, I will add the code for that as well.

You can export the output to a file using below command.

Get-ADNestedGroupMembers -GroupName "Test1" | out-file -Filepath c:\temp\test1.txt

Hope this helps…

Adding domain groups to local administrators group on remote computers(servers/workstations) is most common activity any system administrator do. I got similar task today and realized that I don’t have a PowerShell function to do. We know it is simple and can build command on fly, but having a function is much more useful. So, I have written below function and added to my techibee module(will publish this soon).

This script takes three arguments. 1) ComputerName — on which you want to do this operation. 2)GroupName — that you want to add to the local administrators group of remote computer 3) DomainName — an optional parameter using which you can pass the domain name if the group you are adding belongs to different domain that of your computer is currently in.

function Add-DomainGroupToLocalAdministrator {
param (
[parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
$ComputerName,            

[parameter(Mandatory = $true)]
$GroupName,            

$DomainName
)            

if(!($DomainName)) {
    Import-Module ActiveDirectory
    $DomainName = (Get-AdDomain).DNSRoot.ToString()
}            

try {            

    $AdminGroup = [ADSI]("WinNT://$ComputerName/Administrators,Group")
    $AdminGroup.Add("WinNT://$DomainName/$GroupName,Group")
    Write-host "Successfully Added $GroupName to local administrators group of $computerName"            

}
catch {
    Write-Error $_
}            

} 

Hope this helps…

Using PowerShell, we can query who has permissions to a given GPO or a list of GPOs. We can do this either using Quest Active Roles cmdlets or by using native cmdlets that comes along with Windows 7 installation. In this post, I am going to demonstrate and show you the native method. To use the native method, you must be running one of the following:

• Windows Server 2008 R2 on a domain controller
• Windows Server 2008 R2 on a member server that has the GPMC installed
• Windows® 7 with Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) installed. (RSAT includes the GPMC and the Group Policy cmdlets)

GPMC(or RSAT) installation also installs a powershell module called grouppolicy using which we can query the GPOs. Before start dealing with GPOs, we should import this module by using import-module GroupPolicy command.

Below is the sample code that helps you get permissions of a give a GPO.

function Get-GPOPermissions {            

param($GpoName)
import-module GroupPolicy            

$permsobj = Get-GPPermissions -Name $GPOName -All
foreach ($perm in $permsobj) {            

    $obj = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
   GPOName  = $GPOName
   AccountName = $($perm.trustee.name)
        AccountType = $($perm.trustee.sidtype.tostring())
        Permissions = $($perm.permission)
 }
$obj | Select GPOName, AccountName, AccountType, Permissions            

}
}

Below is the sample output:

Hope this helps. I will continue writing some GPO related scripts in coming days.

In this post you will learn how to query SCOM RMS server name of a specific SCOM group using powershell script.

In all my SCOM scripts that I wrote so far, I hardcoded the SCOM RMS server name. Recently I came across a situation where RMS role is moved to another management server in same SCOM group. With this change, obviously all my scripts will fail because the hard coded server is not a RMS server anymore and it has no intelligence to redirect my query to the current RMS sever.

That means we should have a dynamic way using which we can get RMS server automatically from some reliable source. SCOM installations creates a SCP(Service Connection Point) in Active directory for each SCOM group. So now I will show you how to query this SCP using powershell and get the RMS server name.

We can either choose to use build-in Activedirectory module or Quest AD Cmdlets to get information. The below code is based on activedirectory module which is available with Windows 2008 and Windows 7.

function Get-ScomRMSServer {            

Import-Module ActiveDirectory
$Domainname = (Get-ADDomain).DistinguishedName.tostring()
$SCOMObj = Get-ADObject -Filter "Name -eq 'SDKServiceSCP'" -SearchBase $domainname `
-Properties ServiceDNSName, ServiceClassName
$SCOMObj | select serviceclassname, serviceDNSName            

}

Thanks to my colleague(Deepesh) who helped with finding this.

While having some discussion with my wife today, I came across an interesting scenario where “Active Directory Users and Computers” MMC is not showing the “Live Communications Server” tab in user properties though the LCS administrator tools are installed. I searched about same problem in internet and looks like many people have already experienced this. For some, enabling the “advanced features” option in dsa.msc MMC fixed the issue and some people installed the console on XP computers to work around the problem.

In the particular case where my wife did the troubleshooting, she found that LCS administrator tools are of 32-bit version and they were installed on a 64-bit OS server. So, what is the problem? 64-bit OS supports 32-bit right? what is the problem?.

The problem is that, when you launch dsa.msc MMC from run command, it will fire-up 64-bit version of MMC which looks like has some troubles in taking with 32-bit version of LCS tools. Hence, it is not loading the LCS related tabs in the properties of any user accounts.

To work around this problem, one can open dsa.msc in 32-bit mode by just simply typing the below command.

dsa.msc -32

You can use the similar trick to launch any MMC in 32-bit mode. After opening, just look the process name in task manager, you will find mmc.exe*32 which indicates a 32-bit process name. You will find normal mmc.exe if you run mmc without -32 switch.

I somehow felt this is interested topic every systemadmin should aware. Hence authored this post.

Hope this helps. Happy learning…

Originating DC means the Domain controller on which the object is created first. From the originating DC, the changes will replicate to other DCs in the domain. Some times this information is useful/crucial to know where exactly the object is created. This helps is troubleshooting AD replication related issues and sometimes in forensic investigation.

When ever a object is created in active directory, it stores the originating DC name in the meta data of that object. Meta data is something which we can not see from the general AD management tools like dsa.msc or adssite.msc. To view meta data, either we need to use repadmin or the dotnet object. You all know how to use repadmin so in this post I will give you a powershell script which displays the metadata of a given object.

$Domain = "techibee.com"
$objectDN = "cn=user1,cn=users,dc=techibee,dc=com"
$context = new-object System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.DirectoryContext("Domain",$domain)
$dc = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.DomainController]::findOne($context)
$meta = $dc.GetReplicationMetadata($objectDN)
$meta.values

The above script takes two arguments, domain name and object DN and lists all the attributes and their originating DC names. Hope this helps…

Have you started using Group Policy Preferences lately to manage your Windows 7 and Windows 2008 computers? It is possible that Group Policy Preferences can cause increase in login times in your environment if security groups are used for targeting preferences. For example, you may be mapping drives based on user security group membership(ex: sales, finance, etc). Per AskDS, when a security group is used for targeting a group policy preference setting, the computer has to make several round trips to domain controllers to verify the user group membership. This trip time depends on the kind of connectivity you have to domain controllers and the load of DC. If you are on a Wan link, the trip time may be even more. The windows 7/2008 computer won’t allow you to complete the login until this preference setting is evaluated and applied. In such graces the logon time will increase drastically which is a very bad experience for end users.

The AskDS team suggested using Organization Units instead of security groups for targeting. Usage of OUs will reduce the trips to domain controllers as the GPPs have to just parse the DN text of computer/user account to verify if a setting is applicable or not.

After reading the AskDS article, I wondered why they(MS) didn’t use security tokens for evaluating computer/user group membership at the time of processing the target. It is very easy and less traffic to domain controllers. It makes sense. Isn’t it?

I question was answered in very short time in the form of another AskDS article.  They exactly implemented what I felt. MS release hotfix(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2561285) which injects this nice feature into Group Policy Preferences which can reduce the user logon times and computer startup times(if you are using security group targeting in computer GPPs).

So, if you are using Group Policy Preferences in your organization, then make sure that all your Windows 7/2008 computers have this hotfix. Otherwise one or other day you will end up looking for it when you users keep complaining about slow login issues.

Today, I quickly wanted to check to which AD site a IP belongs to. If I am the computer where that IP is assinged, it is wasy to find out this information. Since that computer is offline/not reachable, I need some other way.

After bit of googling, I came across below usage of dfsutil. I am very familiar with DFSUTIL but never focused much on the “/sitename” parameter.

So, here you go, if your computer IP is, 192.168.10.130 you know to which AD site it belongs by executing “dfsutil.exe /sitename:192.168.10.130″ and outlook will display the site name.

C:>dfsutil /sitename:192.168.10.130

Microsoft(R) Windows(TM) Dfs Utility Version 4.2
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1991-2005. All Rights Reserved.

 Site for 192.168.10.130 is INDIA

Done processing this command.

C:>

In above example INDIA is my active directory site name.

With powershell, it is very easy to unlock a active directory user account. It is as easy as executing below command.

Unlock-qaduser myuser1

Only thing is, you need to have Quest Powershell cmdlets for active directory installed in your computer.

Similarly you can perform some more quick actions with Quest active directory cmdlets

Query all disabled accounts:

Get-QADuser -disabled

Query all locked accounts:

Get-QADUser -locked

Hope this helps…

Auditing active directory has become a vital important factor for many organizations since they use it managing many security aspects like shares permissioning, printers provisioning, access to critical things like IRM(information rights management), etc. Not only these, there are many other things which uses active directory objects for managing the security permissions.

Considering these, now a day’s organizations insist their IT staff to continuously monitor active directory changes; more precisely security group changes. Quest compliance tools is the first product that comes into mind when someone talks about Active Directory auditing — the reason is simple, I already got my hands wet with that. Quest has really nice setup of tools for managing/auditing Active Directory environment. (1) Quest Active Roles Server  — It is a awesome product for delegating and managing change history of active directory object. It is very helpful in delegating rights to L1/L2 IT admin staff at granular level, i. e to the level of attributes. But one downside/limitation with this product is, it is not meant for auditing the changes made to active directory made through native methods, like through dsa.msc and scripts. (2) Quest Intrust plug-in for Active Directory: – This one is designed to cover the limitation that ARS has. This plug-in won’t help you in managing/delegating active directory objects/permissions but this is for monitoring and logging all sorts of changes made to Active Directory Domain/Schema/Configuration partitions. All it does is monitors these partitions and logs the events to event log.

Well, enough talking about Quest products and promoting them — Sorry I am not a quest sales personJ. Moreover they are costly and organizations need to put in some money if they want to leverage the benefits of these products. So, let’s talk about “how to make the group changes auditing work” through native mechanism.

Cheaper solution to monitor active directory group changes:

As many of you already aware, windows 2003/2008 provides some built-in auditing mechanisms. If you didn’t ever get a chance to see them what they are, you should go and read some stuff from MS technet site. In a nut shell,

To enable auditing of Active Directory objects:

a)       Configure an audit policy setting for all domain controllers. When you configure an audit policy setting, you can audit objects but you cannot specify the object you want to audit.

                To configure audit policy, edit “default domain controller” GPO, navigate to “Computer Configuration” -> “Windows Settings” -> “Security Settings” -> “Local Polices” -> “Audit Policies” and set the “Audit Directory Services Access” policy to log “Success” and “failure” events. Make sure that “Default Domain Controller” policy is being applied to all Domain controllers in your domain

b)       Configure auditing for specific Active Directory objects (security groups in this case). After you specify the Active Directory objects, Windows Server tracks and logs these events.

        To select the auditing for a specific objects, security groups in our case, go the OU where you have all your security group objects in active directory, go to the properties of OU, click on “Advanced” and switch to “Auditing” tab and in the list of names, double-click “everyone” and select “Successful” or “failure” check box for the actions you want to audit. Since our aim in this article is to monitor security group member ship changes, select the “successful” check box for “Write members” action.

This completes auditing setup for security group’s objects and your server will start writing the events to Security event log whenever there is a change to the membership of security group you configured.

NOTE: If you are running windows 2008 Active Directory, then story is bit different. The auditing of active directory objects is divided into four sub categories and you need to enable auditing for “Directory Service Changes” subcategory. Go through this TechNet link for more information in this regard.

Disclaimer: These are just my thoughts and experience I want to share. I am not responsible for any kind of damage made to your environment with the steps I provided. One should thoroughly test these changes before trying in production environment. Use at your own risk.

Happy learning…