six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2017-04-01

Reset VSS Writers

VSS writers are application-specific components for Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy Service, which ensure the consistency of application data when a shadow copy is created. That's quite useful for creating consistent backups of a system. However, some of these writers go into error states more or less frequently. And Microsoft did not deem it necessary to document how to reset writers without rebooting the entire system (or at least I didn't manage to find that piece of information).

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Posted 16:19 [permalink]

2015-03-12

Transfer Active Directory Site Subnets

A while ago I had to take a couple hundred subnets (don't ask) of an Active Directory site in one domain and re-create them in another domain. Doing that manually would've been a real pain. But if you export the subnets to a file the list can easily be transferred to the other domain and imported there.

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Posted 17:42 [permalink]

2015-01-18

Adding Group Members Across Domains

Normally when you add a member to an Active Directory group you'll simply use the Add-GroupMember cmdlet from the ActiveDirectory module. Except when you have to do it across domains/forests where the source domain is still running Windows Server 2008 (not R2). As in "no AD PowerShell cmdlets" and "no Active Directory Web Service (ADWS)". *sigh*

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Posted 18:25 [permalink]

2014-07-11

Compare ACLs

Recently I had the need to compare the ACLs of two Active Directory objects. With file ACLs I could expand their Access properties and compare the resulting lists with Compare-Object. However, for ACLs of Active Directory objects that didn't work, so I came up with the following function.

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Posted 18:50 [permalink]

2012-10-29

A Wrapper Class for Active Directory Queries

Tired of writing the same boilerplate code for querying objects from Active Directory over and over again? So am I. Thus I wrote ADQuery, a class that wraps the initialization of the required objects, sets some default values and also provides properties to allow for adjusting the usual parameters as the situation requires. See API documentation for details.

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Posted 19:49 [permalink]

2010-06-14

Active Directory Documentation

When you inherit an existing (usually home-grown) Active Directory, it can be a real pain to figure out how the thing was actually configured by the previous admin(s). In a situation like that it's kinda nice to have a tool at hand that'll do the dirty work for you.

Of course there's pay-ware like ADscribe, but personally I find $99 kinda expensive for something you're going to use every other decade (or so). Microsoft's own Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is freeware (well, sort of, since it requires Visio), but it has to be installed, and the results weren't that convincing when I tried to run it from outside the target domain.

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Posted 21:37 [permalink]