This code has been in my drafts box for 2 years. I figured I'd just go ahead and publish it, though I'm unsure of the context now. 1$dom = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Domain]::GetCurrentDomain() 2$root = $dom.GetDirectoryEntry() 3$search = [System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher]$root 4$search.Filter …

So I'm making the move to PowerShell. It's painful learning such alien (to me) concepts but books like Lee Holmes' PowerShell: The Definitive Guide help a ton. I was fortunate enough to be the editor for Chapters 1-5 and got a sneak preview. It's a fantastic book and can't wait to receive the title, complete with …

When creating a new Active Directory user from the command line in PowerShell, you will likely find yourself using Read-Hosts's asSecureString switch when entering the password. $password = Read-Host "Enter password" -AsSecureString Next, you'll probably look around the Internets for a few hours or so trying …

Aw yaille! I just wrote up a whole explanatory blog post then lost it so this one will likely be brief... or not. Recently, we found that one of our DNS servers was resolving external hostnames unacceptably slow -- about 5 seconds, give or take. The resolution was so slow, in fact, that all of the clients hopped on to …

Recently, someone asked if there was a way to be notified when servers have been added to an Active Directory domain. I looked around the Internet and it seems there's not a direct way to do this without some large software package. So in lieu of having an instant notification, I created a script that tallies up newly …

So if you have SQL Server installed locally, you're lucky enough to have access to SQLDeeMO. You can then easily enumerate SQL Servers with the following code. Note: If you do decide to use VBScript and SQLDeeMO, you will need to remove the "ee" in the script below. I didn't want to put in the actual object …

My friend Sharfa and I were exchanging some of our favorite code snippets and he showed me one for enumerating Exchange Servers in Active Directory. I dug the code but wanted to try to see if I could use my Recordset/ADsDSOObject skrills to shorten the code. The outcome isn't any shorter but it does get the version, so …

Damn, the ADsDSOObject rocks! This script, which weighs in at less than 20 lines, finds all machines running any form of Windows Server on a given domain. Note that this script isn't useful in finding domain controllers, but rather any machine running Windows Server. …

Recently, I wanted to write a web-based front end to AD User Management for our help desk. The way that I set it up apparently broke some Kerberos delegation rules and even though Microsoft wrote a step-by-step guide on how to get IIS and Kerberos delegation going, the solution didn't work for me. If I turned off …

Recently, two of the network administrators at my firm ran into an issue with with the Active Directory Users and Computers MMC snap-in. ADUC often loaded slowly. Sometimes rebooting would fix the issue, sometimes it wouldn't. I never had an issue but I didn't use ADUC as often on my workstation (I use it primarily on …