While working with Active Directory Users and Computers, I felt pain sometimes, to see when the user is modified last, home mailbox server, User account is locked or not, and many other parameters. I need to go to user properties and check each piece of information in each tab. Sometimes, I miss to enable “advanced features” option which gives me some more details in properties. I felt it’s enough and questioned myself, “Do I need to really navigate to all tabs in User properties to get the information I want?” and asked my friend “google.com” which showed me some way out J
I found lot of help over internet to add a new option to User Context menu and clicking which invokes a VB script. I quickly followed the procedure and I am able to get the work done in the way I like (“One Click to get User Info”).
Please note that you need to write your own script based on the attributes you want to view. I wrote a script (Get-User-Info.Vbs) which satisfied my needs and placed it at Google Documents for public reference
Procedure:
Logon to any machine where you have Windows 2003 support tools installed and type “adsiedit.msc” in RUN command.
It opens up ADSI Edit MMC. Configuration Container -> “Cn=Configuration,DC=Yourdomain,DC=COM” -> “CN=DisplaySpecifiers” -> “CN=409”
In right hand pane, go to the properties of “CN=User-Display” object and edit the attribute, “adminContextMenu” in Attribute Edit tab
Add the below value (without quotes) to list. There might be some other entries which has 6 at the beginning; choose another number if that is the case
“6, &Show User Info,\yourdomain.comnetlogonget-user-info.vbs”
Note: In above command I mentioned the DFS share. You can change it to any other share in file server as per your convenience. Please remember to place the script at the location your are mentioning
Click on OK to finish your editing and reopen the “Active Directory Users and Computers” MMC.
Now Right click on any user account, and you will be able to see “Show User Info” option. When you click this, the script will get invoked and displays the result you are looking for. Look at the below pictures.
Tags : How to add custom menu in active directory, Easy way to get user information, Quickly access user information, Customize Active Directory to Display User information
I know, there are various methods and scripts available in web to get the list of domain controllers information in a domain. Still I want to write this post to present simplest way of doing it from a windows XP/Windows 2003 machine using my favorite command nltest.
Syntax: nltest.exe /DCLIST:<domain name>
Example : nltest.exe /DCLIST:pamarths.com
Here pamarths.com is my domain name and executing this will give DC name, and the site to which it belongs to. Please note that you need to install windows support tools package to get nltest command. You can do numerous other things with this command. I will write another post when I find some time.
By default, Active Directory will not give a option for creating “Container” objects. It only allows you to create Organization units for grouping the AD objects. However, if your situation demands, you can create a container objects by following the below procedure.
Open adsiedit.msc and navigate to schema partition
Select Cn=Schema,CN=Configuration, DC=domain,DC=com in left plane
In right plane, look for cn=contianer object and go to it’s properties
Change the value of defaultHidingValue to FALSE
This will give a option for creating a container object when you right click on any OU/container and select “new” option. Container also will be listed in that list along with OU, User, computer, etc etc.
More about defaultHidingValue attribute:
A Boolean value that specifies the default setting of the showInAdvancedViewOnly property of new instances of this class. Many directory objects are not interesting to end users. To keep these objects from cluttering the UI, every object has a Boolean attribute called showInAdvancedViewOnly.
If defaultHidingValue is set to TRUE, new object instances are hidden in the Administrative snap-ins and the Windows shell. A menu item for the object class will not appear in the New context menu of the Administrative snap-ins—even if the appropriate creation wizard properties are set on the object class’s displaySpecifier object.
If defaultHidingValue is set to FALSE, new instances of the object are displayed in the Administrative snap-ins and the Windows shell. Set this property to FALSE to see instances of the class in the administrative snap-ins and the shell and enable a creation wizard and its menu item in the New menu of the administrative snap-ins.
If the defaultHidingValue value is not set, the default is TRUE.
DAG(Database Availability Group) is a new feature provided in Exchange 2010 to facilitate automatic database level recovery. In Exchange 2003/2007, there is no option to recover a single damaged/corrupted mailbox store alone than restoring the DB from backup. In this case, I will loose all the data added to the store after backup. This feature(DAG) of Exchange 2010 avoids this data loss and provides a seem less and automated recovery with up-to-date information regardless of when you last backed up the store.
Few points I have to highlight about DAG
A DAG can consists of 16 exchange 2010 servers max. Which means that any database in these 16 exchange servers can be failed over to another server in the same DAG incase of curruption. The failover time is as low as 30 seconds and transparent to users.
DAGs use continuous replication and a subset of Windows Failover Clustering technologies to provide continuous mailbox availability. So you need to install this manually on Exchange 2010 server or it will get installed automatically when you add it to DAG
It’s needs a file share witness share to maintain the availability of Exchange servers in DAG
DAG configuration has some similarities with Cluster configuration like, CNO creation, multiple network cards for exchange hear beat data and public data, common IP to access DAG CNO, etc
When I heard about it in Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009 session, I got a feeling that it is a very big feature that every one should look into it. Though I couldn’t understand it properly in that session, I did some search/research after coming back to my desk to know what it is and below are the points I collected about it.
#1. First of all it’s a not great feature that every corporate will get benefited largely. But one can enable this feature on requirement basis looking at the functionality it has #2. It gives a secondary mailbox for every user which will appear under your normal mailbox in outlook/OWA. No additional configuration is needed, if the archive feature is enabled outlook detects it automatically and adds it into your configuration. #3. You can migrate all your PST data to this archive mailbox and you can access the data when you are in roaming. You can migrate your PSTs by just doing drag drop operation onto archive mailbox #4. You can configure retention policies in primary mailbox to move the items into archive mailbox. #5. You can maintain separate quotas for your primary and archive mailboxes. This results in high performance and speed of your primary mailbox while you store your large amount of mails in archive mailbox. #6. Search across primary and secondary(archive) mailboxes is possible #7. You can either choose to keep primary and archive mailboxes on same store or in different stores based on your requirement and frequency of archive access.
I haven’t tested these features any lab environment as my E2010 lab is not ready yet. I will post more and correct my self if required after doing so.
See this blog entry for nice explanation of archive feature and few FAQs.
While browsing for something, I came across this nice windows built-in tool called, “typeperf”. This tool redirects the output of performance counter values to command prompt. The normal way for collecting performance values is to open perfmon and configure the options trough GUI to capture the output into some CSV or other file. But this command line tool is very handly to have the counter results from command line.
If some one asked me to monitor the CPU utilization of remote system, I will simply issue below command in my command prompt(ofcourse I need admin rights on remote machine or the account I am using should be member of permon related groups if the remote machine is of a server OS). This command has most of the options that you can set using perfmon.
I attended Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009, Hyderabad from Mar-13th to 15th and it’s really great experience to be there with elite group of IT professional who are highly technical. Out of this three days program I attended last two days sessions completely and I am also there for Steve Ballmer’s (CEO of Microsoft Corporation) key note happened on day one. May 13th…. My excitement to attend tech-ed made me to get out of bed early which is not my daily routine. In fact my mom got surprised :-). I reached the venue (HICC) by 9:30AM to complete registration formalities. In few minutes, I entered the tech-ed area which is already filled with people who are introducing each other. I waited for Chandu(my friend + X-colleague + colleague) to join me and we both made to the key note area and sat in a row from where we can clearly see the people on stage. In few minutes Steve entered the stage with a big round of applaud from all audiences and I really felt happy to see such a great business giant in real. He is like any other person for looks but not for thoughts. He started giving presentation on road map of Microsoft and upcoming releases with few jokes in between to gain peoples attention. I got completely involved in his presentation as I curious to see what Microsoft is cooking in their kitchen. In his presentation, he mentioned that innovation in any field is indirectly linked with innovation in IT(Information Technology). So, the world should say “MORE IT” not “NO IT”. After the presentation, the floor is opened for Q/A session. Many people in the room are ready to shoot some or the other question to Steve but only few got chance who reached the Q/A mike very early. And don’t ask me what questions they asked and Steve’s answers. They(the questions) appeared some kind of crap to me…or I should say, questions are valid but people asked wrong person. What he can comment on future versions of Silver light and other Microsoft products. However, I want to share two questions with you. One is humor involved and another is really worth asking him I feel. Q1: “What is that Microsoft learned from recession and what plans they made to get rid of it future ?”.Hmmm… Steve started answering this question with a smile on a his face. He said, no one can predict the recession when it can come and it is not limited to one organization. Recession comes once in life time(next recession is expected to happen in 21xx considering the previous pattern) and MS has no plans for it yet. He restated that considering the recession time, Microsoft is working on producing products at low cost again with all the latest features that customers are looking for. The Q2 is, “Steve never attended any Microsoft Tech-ed before, since it’s launch 17 years back and Why he made to India Tech-ed and Why to the one happening in Hyderabad?”. He answered that, It’s India tech-ed because, India is the country which has fast growth in no. of people who is studying computer science. It’s India because, Hyderabad has got Development center which is big after the one in Redmond. Wah..!! What a delightful statement that every Indian loves to hear. After his 45 minutes session, I made to office to catch-up my daily tasks and chandu stayed back to continue for Windows 20008 sessions by Microsoft.
May 14th…
I started to attended technical session from this day and I have chosen “Unified Communication and collaboration” sub track under IT pro track. Sessions highlights that I want to share with you are…
Introduction to Microsoft Exchange 2010
Exchange 2007 High availability and Disaster Recovery
Introduction to Exchange 2010 features:
As the title says it’s just a introduction session and below are the features in short that speaker covered
Separate mailbox for archiving
Searching across multiple mailboxes is possible
You can configure IRM for mail items based on from/to addresses and based on content
Easy filtering options in OWA and rich OWA interface is not limited to IE but also to Firefox, safari, chrome.
Conversational views in OWA (like the way you see in forums)
Customize voice mailbox message to give different messages to different people.
Calendar sharing between two organizations
Now you don’t need downtime for mailbox movement from from store to another
Self service page in OWA which enables users to update certain fields like address, mobile, extn of their own
Auto-group membership provisioning.
Exchange 2007 High availability and Disaster Recovery: In this session they just re-iterated the points which most of the IT pro family is already aware of. They talked about CCR, LCR, SCR and their usage. There is very huge amount of material for these in internet. One thing they covered in detail is about Transport Dumpster feature in Exchange 2007 HTS server. You can read more about this at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997963.aspx.
March 15th… It is the last day of tech-ed. People geared to get most out of the event by participating many events conducted over there. The day started with Exchange Online and hosted services. This is a new concept which I heard from Microsoft but very early realized that giants like Google are already into this kind of market. The idea of Exchange online is simple, they provide antivirus, anti-spam and Quarantine facilities for enterprises. If a organization wants to out source these services, then they can choose Microsoft as their vendor. The organization has to point their MX records to Microsoft servers and Microsoft will relay these mails to your exchange servers after anti-virus, anti-spam scans. They have Quarantine facility with enterprise/user level black list and white list. Microsoft Online services is a bit different from Hosted services. In online services Microsoft will host your mailbox, IM, and share point sites in their cloud(a.k.a datacenters) and end users can connect to them using a single sign on client. If the end user have a PC, they can download single sign on client and the client will automatically configure user outlook and office communicator for usage. If any one is interested at Online services, get a trail account from http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-online.mspx Apart from Exchange stuff, I attended two more sessions. One is about OCS VOIP features and another about Office Live meeting. They are just normal and didn’t come across much interesting features except few internal which are useful for Network/OCS administrators. With this I completed technical sessions at Microsoft Tech-ed India 2009. Apart from technical stuff, I had lot off fun at the stalls kept in the tech-ed area. Especially, I enjoyed the games played in X-box 360. They kept for display/sales and delegates are allowed to play them. I spent most of my free time playing games there :-). Other stalls at Tech-ed are, Microsoft learning center where we can get certified for free of cost. Counter are available to test your applications on windows 7 and to see various features of it.
Few things I liked at tech-ed….
Microsoft Learning center where we have access to lot of books
Windows 7 experience and application compatability testing
Microsoft Surface
Microsoft Sam (a robot which can be programmed using Visual Studio)
[If you missed to read part-1 of this article, read it from here]
In part-2, I am going to cover the steps taken by a windows XP computer when the DC it cached goes down. As said earlier, XP caches DC name intially and supplies the DC name to applications that are requesting for it. Also netlogon process frequently checks for the availability of cached DC by doing a LDAP ping. If it finds that cached DC is down, it tries to get another available DC by using /force discovery flag(see nltest help). In this case it may go to a DC which is sitting in other AD site if no local DCs are available. But what I observed is, in some of the cases netlogon is not trying to force rediscover even if the cached DC is down. I guess it has some schedule and it is waiting for it. In this case one can restart netlogon service or use nltest /dsgetdc:domainname.com /force command to refresh the DC list. So now XP is happy that it got another available domain controller at the cost of slow access(because it is in remote site connected by wan links). But remember that XP will not switch automatically to local DC when local DC becomes online again. The netlogon refresh everytime finds the DC(remote one) it cached is available and will not try for force discovery. The XP can get local DC only if either Remote DC it connected goes down or when XP machine is rebooted.
I did some discussion on netlogon behavior in one of the forum and a guy has written to a tool to address the situation where in netlogon fails to get new DC when the cached DC goes down. You can download this tool from here.
Many users often complain to their system adminstrator that their clipboard is not working and they are unable to do copy/paste operations and it is the task of sys admins to break their head to find out the reason. Dear sysadmin…no more you need to do that. I came across a good tool which can help you to solve this problem.
This problem generally occurs when a process locks clipboard for reading and writting and didn’t release it properly. Clipboard will function normally after killing that process. The tool (GetOpenClipboardWindow) will help you to identify the culprit process. Download this tool now and share it with users.
From my experience, I can say that mostly mstsc.exe is the process which blocks the clipboard. The reason I assume here is simple because it dealts with clipboard of connected computer and your computer.
Microsoft has released it’s next version of messaging system, Exchange 2010(beta) a couple of days back.
This is a pretty stunning news for many of M$ customers who just completed their migration to E2k7 or in middle of doing it. Download and have a look at it if you are interested. I am yet to go through the details of it. I will post more after my readings Reference : http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/04/14/451032.aspx ~Sitaram
Steve Ballmer at Tech-ed India 2009
Sitaram Pamarthi(me) with formula-1 car by KingFisher kept for display at Tech-ed area
