Category: 1128

Handling time is somehow challenging task. It can;t be stopped so far so we have to live with schedules and clocks. But this won't be about time physics but more mundane thing. One of my friends has asked me question how to translate pwdLastSet attribute value to some more readable value. My first answer was … Continue reading "How to handle time …"

It looks like we have to remeber new acronym for tool name – ADTD which stands for Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is, as I see it, replacement for older tool known for some people like ADMap. It allows You to build Visio diagram representing Active Directory configuration based on data from catalog itself. ADTD can … Continue reading "Active Directory Topology Diagrammer"

Almost month without a post … time to get to work. BTW – it is a little strange but more people are visiting this place (according to statistics gathered from the blog) now then in the time when I've posted more often. If I will stop blogging will I get massive visit hit??? 🙂 Every … Continue reading "ADSEdit and group membership"

joe has released new version of excelent ADFind tool, You can read about this update and grab new version on joe's blog. I want to mention only one of the aspects of this update – on Windows 2008 (aka Longhorn) this version gives You access to new statistics for LDAP queries from AD. Let's take … Continue reading "ADFind udpate, stats and performance"

VMRCPlus is new tool which will become public soon or even is released right now. This is one of the tools I've asked "why it is not public" when I've joined Microsoft two years ago (wow, it is two years this month). VMRCPlus is client tool for Virtual Server which will allow You to connect … Continue reading "VMRCPlus"

LDP is one of a magic tool for LDAP which used at customer site in most cases makes You looking as some kind of AD wizard. To be honest I don't know why but in many cases it works in this way. Maybe one of the reason for this is "lack" of documentation for LDP … Continue reading "LDP.exe documentation"

Today on microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory newsgroup somebody came with a question how he can remove and add workstations to domain, without performing this operation manually on every workstation? Because of some DR situation he had 250 workstations which were a member of non-existing domain and new AD, and wanted to add them back to domain. The same … Continue reading "How to remove\add workstation from\to domain remotely?"

New Knowledge Base article KB 930056 was published on 23 December, and it describes procedure which allows Windows Server admin pack tool to be installed and used on Windows Vista. As this procedure was around for a while on lists and newsgroups it's nice to have it as a new and shiny KB article :).

I was working lately on some code which utilizes Active Directory and I came across problem that trying to access some of objects raised an exception with E_ADS_BAD_PATHNAME message. After short investigation I found out that this objects for which this exception was raised had slash character in distinguishedName. These objects were representing physical locations … Continue reading "Slash character in AD object distinguishedName"

Yesterday I was at customer site to talk about identity management and as it often happens some other topics were discussed with customer tech stuff after discussing main topics. In this discussion I was asked how to read and parse security descriptor for  Active Directory object. After few questions we came to conclusion that they … Continue reading "How to check if I can update attribute?"