Active Directory on Remko's Blog

Read Maximum Password Age with PowerShell

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:47:44 +0000

I needed to read out the Maximum Password age with a PowerShell script in a Windows 2003 domain.

Reading out the maxPwdAge attribute is a trivial task in PowerShell (I am re-using the function AdsLargeIntegerToInt64):

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$domain = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry

# Read maxPwdAge attribute and convert to Int64
$maxPwdAge = AdsLargeIntegerToIn64 $Domain.maxPwdAge.Value

In my case this returns the value -78624000000000 but how do we interpret this?

Settings NTFS Permissions by SID in PowerShell

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:21:42 +0000

I am currently creating a PowerShell script that creates a user with all needed Active Directory attributes, Exchange mailbox, (TS) Home- and Profile directories and so on.

In such a script you can easily get failures because of Active Directory replication.

Check if a useraccount exists with PowerShell

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 11:51:37 +0000

Function below can be used to check if a given Username exists in Active Directory:

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function UserExists([string]$Username)
{
	$strFilter = "(&(objectCategory=person)(sAMAccountName=$Username))"

	$objDomain = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry

	$objSearcher = New-Object System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher
	$objSearcher.SearchRoot = $objDomain
	$objSearcher.PageSize = 1000
	$objSearcher.Filter = $strFilter
	$objSearcher.SearchScope = "Subtree"

	$colResults = $objSearcher.FindAll()
	return [bool]($colResults -ne $null)
}

AD Internals: Display RID Allocation Pools

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:37:04 +0000

In my previous post I wrote about a problem I had with duplicate RID Allocation pools.

But how do we get more insight into these RID Allocation pools?

The DCDIAG tool can display this information per domain controleler using the following syntax

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dcdiag /s:server /v /test:ridmanager

Example output:

But where in Active Directory is this information stored and can we display it for all Domain Controllers at once for larger environments?

The case of the duplicate SID’s

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:04:01 +0000

I encountered another interesting error during Exchange 2010 installation today. During the Organization Preparation I got the following error:

The setup.log doesn’t give us much more detailed info:

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[06-22-2011 11:16:29.0614] [2] [ERROR] Active Directory operation failed on dc001.zorg.local. This error is not retriable. Additional information: The requested object has a non-unique identifier and cannot be retrieved.
Active directory response: 0000219D: SvcErr: DSID-031A0FC0, problem 5003 (WILL_NOT_PERFORM), data 0

[06-22-2011 11:16:29.0630] [2] [ERROR] The server cannot handle directory requests.
[06-22-2011 11:16:29.0630] [2] Ending processing initialize-ExchangeUniversalGroups
[06-22-2011 11:16:29.0630] [1] The following 1 error(s) occurred during task execution:
[06-22-2011 11:16:29.0630] [1] 0. ErrorRecord: Active Directory operation failed on dc001.zorg.local. This error is not retriable. Additional information: The requested object has a non-unique identifier and cannot be retrieved.
Active directory response: 0000219D: SvcErr: DSID-031A0FC0, problem 5003 (WILL_NOT_PERFORM), data 0

[06-22-2011 11:16:29.0630] [1] 0. ErrorRecord: Microsoft.Exchange.Data.Directory.ADOperationException: Active Directory operation failed on dc001.zorg.local. This error is not retriable. Additional information: The requested object has a non-unique identifier and cannot be retrieved.
Active directory response: 0000219D: SvcErr: DSID-031A0FC0, problem 5003 (WILL_NOT_PERFORM), data 0

I remembered from a Tweet by Helge Klein recently that the Active Directory schema has no mechanism for enforcing uniqueness of an attribute.

Exchange 2010 well-known object entry install error

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:52:30 +0000

Today I was testing the installation of Exchange 2010 in a VMWare sandbox environment. We created the sandbox to test migration from a 2003 AD and Exchange environment to 2008 R2 with Exchange 2010.

We used a P2V to get real copies of the Active Directory and the AD upgrade to 2008 R2 was already tested.

But during the Exchange installation in the sandbox I got the following error:

Reading the otherWellKnownObjects attribute with PowerShell

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 11:19:25 +0000

I wanted to read the otherWellKnownObjects attribute from an Active Directory object.

In my case this was the Microsoft Exchange container in the Configuration partition:

The otherWellKnownObjects attribute is of type ADSTYPE_DN_WITH_BINARY which unfortunately cannot be viewed or edited with ADSI Edit: