We recently had an issue that started of with a problem promoting some domain controllers in Azure. We’d set up the site to site VPN and wanted to stretch the Forest into Azure. It seemed like a simple plan… Problems arose when we promoted the domain controller with errors such as System log: Can’t process […]
Backup GPO Settings with retention
Backing up Active Directory should be part and parcel of creating a forest, however an often overlooked area is GPO settings. Of course these are backed up along with AD, but restoring settings from an AD backup is pretty traumatic. GPO settings should be backed up so that you can quickly apply an older version or […]
Windows Firewall not writing to its logfiles
As part of Group Policy Management guidelines from the Centre of Internet Security (CIS), the recommendation is to turn on Firewall logging on all Windows Servers, and to save each profile to their own log file. Configuring this in Group Policy is pretty straight forward. Just type in the new file name for each profile, […]
Week 5 – Advanced Windows Security Course
Firstly apologies for taking this long to get back to doing the week 5 blog. It has been a manic couple of months and it doesn’t look like it is going to let up either! Anyway, so far we have covered Windows 10/Windows Server 2016 – Platform Security and Internals Attacks on Credentials & Prevention […]
Week 4 – Advanced Windows Security Course
Happy New Year to you all, 2017 is here! I’m spending the first week of 2017 catching up on the 4th week of course work… So far we have covered Windows 10/Windows Server 2016 – Platform Security and Internals Attacks on Credentials & Prevention Solutions Attacking & Securing Windows Network Handling Ransomware & Other Malicious […]
Week 3 – Advanced Windows Security Course
Wow the first two weeks have whizzed on by, in fact together with my normal workload I’m struggling to keep up with the pace! So far we have covered Windows 10/Windows Server 2016 – Platform Security and Internals Attacks on Credentials & Prevention Solutions Attacking & Securing Windows Network Handling Ransomware & Other Malicious Software […]
Week 2 – Advanced Windows Security Course
Week 1 is behind us and we covered some great material! It has already been a real eye opener to see how easy it is to gain access to a machine and extract information from it. Last week we covered Windows 10/Windows Server 2016 – Platform Security and Internals Attacks on Credentials & Prevention Solutions […]
Week 1 – Advanced Windows Security Course
This week marks the start of a course I am attending called ‘Advanced Windows Security Course for 2017‘ run by Paula Januszkiewicz from CQURE. I am looking forward to seeing this course progress and discover various tips and tricks to break into operating systems and how to prevent those vulnerabilities So who are CQURE? CQURE […]
Links and Backlinks in Active Directory for Exchange
In Active Directory (AD) there is the concept of objects, attributes and links between objects. AD Objects AD objects (or more correctly Object Classes) include users, groups, computers, service connection points, OUs, etc. They are the type of things about which we want to store information. An instance of an AD object class is an […]
SMART AD Migrator Architecture
This week we will look more deeply into the Binary Tree SMART AD Migrator software’s architecture, and how to scale up or out. We introduced AD Migrator in an earlier blog called “Introducing SMART AD Migrator from Binary Tree”. If you’ve not heard of the product before it is worth reading the overview first. Right, […]
Introducing SMART AD Migrator from Binary Tree
We’ve just had two days of training using the revamped SMART AD Migrator software from Binary Tree. They’ve had an AD migration tool for some time, but it used to have various issues. These resulted in a total overhaul of the product, and this current release looks to be in a good stable state. The […]
Demystifying AD Schema Extensions for Exchange
Now most people who have been around Active Directory (AD) will understand about the AD schema and that some applications like Exchange, Lync, etc make updates to this schema. However not everyone is intimately familiar with AD, so let’s start at the beginning… Active Directory 101 Microsoft introduced Active Directory back in the Windows 2000 […]