Azure is a great service for hosting virtual machines, however sometimes VMs get into trouble and aren’t able to boot… Then you find yourself longing for a keyboard and screen connected directly or via Hyper-V or ESX. Alas don’t despair there are two options that may help! Serial Console Within the Azure Portal there is […]
SharePoint visible to unlicensed users
As the title says there is a little known ‘feature’ in SharePoint. Basically SharePoint has no licence associated with it. Any users created in your Azure AD will have access to SharePoint as along as the SharePoint permissions allow it. So if you use the All Users excluding Guests then even an unlicensed user in […]
Find differences between two GPO templates
If you’ve been dealing with Group Policy Objects (GPO) for any length of time you’ll know that when a new version of the ADMX templates are released there are often no release notes as to what has changed. If you’re lucky you’ll find the occasional blog that tells you what may be some of the […]
Inside Kerberos – 7: Wrap up
Alright, we’ve covered a lot of ground, but let’s wrap up by grabbing our original questions and answering the 1. Why is there a problem with SIDHistory and Domain Local Groups, and exactly what is the problem? We’ve seen that Domain Local groups can have sid-history applied from one domain to another, this allows for […]
Inside Kerberos – 6: Conversations
We have covered a lot of ground so far, and we have touched on the Kerberos conversations that go on, but let’s take a deeper look at exactly how these messages are made up and how they are protected. Elements to protect the transmission Secret Keys Secret keys are stored inside the Security Account Manager […]
Inside Kerberos – 5: Tokens
Alright then, we’ve covered SIDs, SIDHistory, and Tickets. Let’s move onto Access Tokens. Privilege Access Certificate The Privilege Access Certificate or PAC is a Microsoft extension to Kerberos utilizing the Authorization Data field in the tickets. This is sometimes referred to as the Access Token, however strictly speaking the Access Token is the structure generated […]
Inside Kerberos – 4: Tickets
Ok I think we have talked enough about SIDs in the previous two parts on SIDs and SIDHistory. Let’s move on to Kerberos tickets… Luckily in Kerberos there are really only two tickets (which confusingly are sometimes also referred to as Tokens) Ticket Granting Ticket (TGT) Service Ticket (ST) Both of these tickets are issued […]
Inside Kerberos – 3: SIDHistory
In this blog we will be exploring SID History, and it follows on from Part 1 which gave an overview of Kerberos, and Part 2 which was all about SIDs. The attribute sid-history has been there right since Windows 2000 and is used to store all of the SIDs that an object has had. […]
Inside Kerberos – 2: SIDs
In Part 1 we set the scene in regards to how Kerberos works at a high level, so let’s now get down and dirty with Security Identifiers (SIDs) What is a Security Identifier (SID)? From MSDN: “A security identifier (SID) is a unique value of variable length used to identify a trustee. Each account has […]
Inside Kerberos – 1: Overview
I recently did some work at a client to help migrate them to a new Active Directory. While setting up the migration including password and SidHistory syncs I told them to be careful of Domain Local Groups which can cause issues if users are nested directly in them. Now I knew this was true, but […]
Add open with Notepad as Administrator
So often do I work on my laptop or on servers and I have to open a file in Notepad to edit it, however the file is protected so you have to not only be an administrator but you need to use ‘Run as Administrator’ Now that’s all well and good if the menu item […]
DirectAccess warm standby without IPv6
DirectAccess has come a long way and with Windows Server 2016 it is pretty easy to install as a single site, single server deployment. What if you need additional resilience though, what if you want a fail over server? You can of course go down the multi-site route but that needs IPv6 to be deployed […]
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