Active Directory: Role Based Access Modeling

Much of my time is spend delving into the minutia of a particular technology to resolve issues or improve department processes. But sometimes understanding and implementing a technology is not the best “fix” for an issue. Sometimes it is a mindset or a model that needs to change. I came up with this security grouping model to address some of the pains of managing permissions across large groups of systems in our environment. Ok, I modified a long standing Microsoft recommendation of AGDLP (an abbreviation of “account, global, domain local, permission”) to meet our needs. Regardless here is a quick rundown of this security group model I devised if anyone is interested.

Outlook 2010: Photo Sizing Tool

2011-02-01 2 min read Active Directory Exchange Microsoft Powershell System Administration Zachary Loeber

We are about to get into full swing with our Exchange 2010 mailbox migrations and, soon afterwards, Office 2007 to 2010 upgrades as well. Unfortunately, we don’t have our Sharepoint farm upgraded to 2010 yet so there will be no automatic syncing of user photos into the GAL for those nice vanity pics which you can view in Outlook 2010. I know people like to be seen so I found a nice powershell based GUI for our (awesome) service desk team to use to upload these photos for users as requested. But you still have to get these photos thumbnailed to approximately 96×96 before uploading. Repeated manual labor is the anathema of any self respecting sysadmin who knows how to hack other people’s code to suit their needs. So I whipped up a very dirty (as in, “wow, get the bar of soap” dirty) hack which combines this person’s clever photo-sizing hack with the prior mentioned gui.

Exchange: Remove entire OU from address book

2011-01-22 1 min read Active Directory Exchange Microsoft System Administration Vbscript/Hta Zachary Loeber

Here is another script that I hacked together in part of an AD/Exchange cleanup task to remove disabled users from the address book. This script, more specifically, removes an entire OU of users from the address book, so make sure that all the users are disabled in the OU you will be running this against! 🙂

Exchange: Remove entire OU from address book

2011-01-22 1 min read Active Directory Exchange Microsoft System Administration Vbscript/Hta Zachary Loeber

Big-IP: Sharepoint 2010 Monitor

2011-01-21 1 min read Active Directory BIG-IP Linux Microsoft Networking Sharepoint System Administration Zachary Loeber

While specing out a Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration I discovered that the default monitor created by the application template on our big-ip LTM load balancers does not work. In seeking a solution I ran across this gentleman’s blog with a custom external monitor but found that it didn’t really work. The solution to make it work was simple (as I explained on his blog in a comment). I went ahead and extended it to be more environment generic.

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