DCPROMO Keeping You Up At Night? Do you schedule DCPROMO activities for the weekend? After hours? Middle of the night? I remember those days. Often it was hard to get in the right frame of mind to think through all of the exact procedural steps during those late night change controls. It was always...

Who owns your OUs? Have you ever lost your keys? It is a scary feeling. Someone out there could have keys to your house and your car. Your personal safety could be at risk. The same is true in Active Directory. Do you know who has the keys to all of your accounts? The Problem In Active Directory...

New Years Resolution Hi folks. It's your friendly, neighborhood PFE again. In order to avoid the long lines to buy a treadmill the first week of January I thought I would save you some time and give you an easier New Years Resolution… Learn PowerShell. It's time to part with "blankie". ...

Background Anyone who wants to write scripts for Active Directory will eventually run into the famous userAccountControl attribute. Usually this comes up when you are searching for disabled accounts. Actually this attribute is a bit flag for 22 different account settings! You can find them clearly...

Introduction Back in May I released a post on the Hey Scripting Guy blog showing how to create a shortcut to unlock a user account with a PowerShell desktop shortcut . That post was very popular, and the comments evolved into another shortcut to reset passwords. Due to the popularity and utility of...

Today I have the privilege of speaking at DogfoodCon 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. My topic is “Active Directory PowerShell Step-By-Step” . This post includes a download of the slide deck and demo scripts for the session. Here are the resource links that I shared today: RSAT Download for...

I remember back in high school the janitor had this massive ring of keys on his belt. The keys would jingle with each step as he pushed the broom down the hall. It was like his own percussion section accompanying the tune he whistled. So what does this have to do with PowerShell? The Scenario After...

PowerShell Saturday 002 Today I have the privilege of speaking at the second-ever PowerShell Saturday event. As a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer I get to meet many customers and help them with their Active Directory and PowerShell needs. I’ve taken some of that experience and wrapped it into...

Author's note: Before you dismiss this article you should know that the top two areas where I find issues for AD health are replication and DNS. If you're short on time skip to the bottom section "But Wait… There's More" and run that report in your environment. Otherwise I think you'll get a lot...

TechMentor Last week I spent some time working on my presentation for the TechMentor conference coming up in August. It's not too late to get in on the action, and this year it's going to be in the heart of Microsoft country. I hope to see you there. Tapioca Goodness I love tapioca pudding...

Our Microsoft Customer Service and Support experts have released a new tool for diagnosing AD replication errors: ADREPLSTATUS . Here is the description from the download page : The Active Directory Replication Status Tool (ADREPLSTATUS) analyzes the replication status for domain controllers in an...

TechReady At Microsoft we have an internal event called TechReady that happens twice each year. It is similar to our public TechEd event. Approximately 5,000 Microsoft technical field people from all over the world gather to learn the details of the latest product releases and dialog with the product...

Today I posted over on the Hey Scripting Guy blog with a quick tip to unlock Active Directory user accounts . Check it out: Active Directory Account Unlock Shortcut for Help Desk

The PowerShell Tool Belt For Active Directory This is huge. Today's post includes demo scripts for all five free ways to script Active Directory in PowerShell . I presented these last weekend at the first ever PowerShell Saturday event in Columbus, Ohio . You will also find attached a one hour audio...

Free. Double your money back. Cheap at twice the price. Today IT budgets are tighter than packets on a 56k modem. Have you ever asked your boss to buy some scripting tools to help do your job? Which response did they give you? "Where do you think you are? Wal-Mart?" "Sure. Email me an ROI...

My last post on getting started with Active Directory was so popular that I thought I would do one for getting started with Group Policy . Once again this link list will satisfy everyone from beginner to advanced. I know there are many other third party resources and books, but I want to surface Microsoft...

This article is for all of the IT Pros who have inherited an Active Directory environment which they did not build. Today's post offers some simple scripts to document the history of schema updates. This is particularly handy when it comes time to extend the schema for a domain upgrade or Exchange implementation...

As a Microsoft Premier Field Engineer I frequently get asked for more information on Active Directory topics. Most of the time I end up passing along one or more of the links in today's post. I finally decided to put these all in one place for quick reference. This list will be extremely valuable for...

This weekend I'll be celebrating Christmas in the US. Today Santa brought me a 1500VA 865W UPS for my home lab server. Now I don't have to worry about those winter power hiccups rebooting all of my HyperV guests. Best of all the scripting elves will be able to write presents without interruption. ...

Update: To see all articles in this series click here . In the United States we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow. No matter where you are in the world let us all give thanks for PowerShell. If Windows were the pumpkin pie, then PowerShell would be the whipped cream on top. If Active Directory were...

This post is part three in a series on documenting and remediating SID history in your AD forest. Go back and read part 1 and part 2 if you haven't had a chance yet. In today's episode we will document the domain SIDs so we know from where this latent access originates. Rosetta Stone Many AD admins...

SID Walker First things first: If Chuck Norris wrote a PowerShell script it would be a one-liner, because Chuck Norris can do anything in one strike. Chuck Norris does not have SID history, because there is only one Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris' ACL only has one ACE: Chuck Norris –...

AD Replication Bandaids The worst part of a bandaid is ripping it off. The cure is worse than the problem. The only thing worse than a bandaid is surgical tape, especially when… never mind. Do you have any bandaids in your AD replication? You know… those manual server connection objects...

AD Replication in TRON terms “The Grid. A digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day... I...

Wouldn’t you know it. The very same day I posted the SID history script I found a shorter way to do it. I'm calling a "do over". I love the PowerShell.com email tip-of-the-day. On that particular day the tip was how to use the ExpandProperty switch on the Select-Object cmdlet. This was new for...