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Monthly Archives: July 2008
Vista is so protective…
A bit of a gotcha with using the Active Directory Users and Computers tool on Vista is that it (very sensibly) protects the objects you create from accidental deletion but (very annoyingly) doesn’t inform you that it’s done this. If you are using the AD Tools on Vista and you suddenly find that you can’t delete something you created, then check the Object tab on the object in question. If the “Protect Object from Accidental Deletion” box is checked as shown here within the red circle:
… you’ll need to uncheck it before you can delete or move it.
RSAT Part 2: Update
It seems I was (half) wrong when I added the ‘and without Scripts’ part to the title of my earlier post.
It appears that in order to push printers to Windows XP machines you still need add the PushPrinterConnections.exe program as a start-up script.
This is not the case with Vista machines where the push works without it.
Setting up an Apple iPhone for use with Exchange
iPhone users who want to connect to Exchange should look at this guide written by Gavin Younger of the ISS UNIX team.
RSAT Part 3: Mapping network drives with Group Policy and without Scripts!
One of most common scripts we write for users and groups of users is a simple drive map.
For example:
net use S: \\campus\software /persistent:yes
Now, Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions & RSAT now allow for drive to be mapped without any extra work.
1. Create and name a new Policy.
2. User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Drive Maps
3. Right Click > New > Mapped Drive
4. Choose the behaviour (Create, Replace, Update or Delete) from the Action dropdown.
5. Enter a location e.g. \\campus\software\
6. Tick reconnect if you want the connection to persist (this replaces the /persistent:yes switch)
7. Choose a drive letter.
8. If you wish you can set the Connect as fields.
9. Make sure the permissions are correct for the target folder.
10. Save and apply your policy.
RSAT Part 2: Deploying Printers with Group Policy and without Scripts!
Historically, in order to deploy printers using Group Policy we would have had to use a combination of scripts.
Now, Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions an updated AD Schema and RSAT allow for printers deployed without any extra work.
1. Create and name a new Policy.
2. If you want to deploy the printer to a machine
Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Deployed Printers
Or
If you want to deploy the printer to users
User Configuration > Windows Settings > Deployed Printers
3. Right click in a blank area of the right-hand pane and select Deploy Printer.
4. Make sure the permissions are correct for the printer.
5. Type in the path to the printer e.g. \\myprintserver\hplaserjet9040
6. Save and apply your policy.
BgInfo v4.13
In case anyone missed it. BgInfo v4.13 was released a few weeks ago. I know that a number of School Computing Officers use this useful tool for audit and support purposes.
I have previously used BGInfo in a startup script to have machines ‘Check in’ to an Access DB. You can use somthing like this (one line):
\\campus\software\pathtofile\Bginfo.exe \\pathtoconfigfile\config.bgi /timer:0
The config.bgi file allows you to set what data you want to capture and set a path for the DB file.
.jpg "BGInfo")
Publishing your Exchange Calendar to the Internet
There are a few different choices when wishing to publish your Exchange calendar to the internet. Some offer frequent and automatic updates, others require manual intervention each time you make a change. Publishing your calendar to internet can be useful when you want to share with someone who doesn’t have a University Exchange mailbox.
1. Publishing to Office Online
Office Online is Microsoft’s free service that allows Microsoft Live users to view and publish calendars to their website. The main pre-requisites are that both publisher and viewer need to have a Live account. Calendars are updated automatically every 20 minutes or so.
You can sign up for live accounts here. You have the option to create a new e-mail account that will provide you with hotmail, or have your @ncl.ac.uk e-mail address become your Live user ID. I’d probably recommend the @ncl.ac.uk route, but it depends what you are after.
The documentation on Office Online on how to publish calendars is very good and thorough, so rather than reinventing the wheel, here is the: Microsoft document.
2. Publish to a WebDAV Server
If you have access to a server that has WebDAV enabled you can publish the calendar information there without needing to have access to a Microsoft Live Account. Unfortunately, it is slightly more difficult to prohibit access. This would be acheived using file sharing permissions. Calendars are updated automatically every 20 minutes or so.
The Office Onlike document detailing publishing to a WebDAV server is here.
3. Save your Calendar as a Web-page
If you select your calendar and then select File – Save As Web Page you can generate files that you can publish on a web server. You have to manually re-save the calendar and re-publish the files every time you make a change to your calendar.
RSAT Part 1: Adding domain users to local machine groups.
In order to add domain accounts to a machines local administrators group we would previously have used code something like this:
net localgroup administrators LocalAdministratorGroupName /add
This guide will show you how to you how to add domain users to local machine groups using the updated Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions & RSAT.
Prerequisites
- RSAT
- Client and server machines must have the Client Side Extensions installed.
1. Create and name a new Policy.
2. Browse to Computer Configuration > Preferences > Local Users and Groups.
3. Right click in a blank area of the right-hand pane and select New > Local Group.
4. From the action dropdown select ‘update’ and from the group name dropdown select ‘Administrators (built-in)’
5. Click the add button.
6. Under name, type your s-id (campus\s-id) and under action make sure that ‘Add to this group’ is selected.
7. Close and save the group policy.
There are many more options available in the Local Users and Groups section alone which may be useful. Next time I’ll look at deploying printers via RSAT.
Introduction to Windows PowerShell
I gave a demo of PowerShell at our OU Admins Christmas Event last December, and I’ve mentioned it a couple of times on mailing lists, but for everyone who missed those or wasn’t convinced, here’s my Introduction to Windows PowerShell…
PowerShell is a command shell and language focusing on Windows system administration. It can be used interactively to get immediate results, or you can write complex scripts and do batch processing. Although it is still not used as much as it should be, PowerShell isn’t a brand new product; it’s been around for a couple of years and version 2 is currently available in its 2nd Community Technical Preview.
Now that PowerShell is part of Microsoft’s Common Engineering Criteria (meaning that product teams pretty-much have to incorporate PowerShell into their new releases), and being incorporated as a feature in Windows Server 2008, you’ll see PowerShell usage sky-rocket! (It’s worth also saying that Microsoft aren’t the only ones adding PowerShell support to their products – VMWare, IBM, Citrix and others see the potential of managing their products this way.)
The thing that sets PowerShell apart from other shells is that it uses pipelines of objects, not of text. It is build on the .NET Framework, but you don’t need to have a developer’s appreciation of .NET to work with PowerShell. In fact one of the best ways of getting started with PowerShell is to just run it each time you were about to run cmd.exe – many of the things you’d want to do there work in PowerShell. If you’ve been a *nix admin in the past, you’ll find that some of the commands you’re familiar with work in PowerShell too.
For example, the PowerShell cmdlet (pronounced “command-let”) to list the contents of a folder, Get-ChildItem, has aliases built in, so that you can use either dir or ls in its place. The interesting thing with PowerShell is that it has providers which let you access other repositories (referred to as PSDrives) in the same way as the file system, so you can do this:
cd HKLM:\software
dir
…and see the contents of a registry hive! (Note that if you want to do a recursive directory listing, the parameters are different to the dir in cmd.exe, so you’ll want to check the help to see what you can do with the cmdlets)
Give it a go and I’m sure you’ll soon find your way around. To get started, Get-Command gives you a list of the available cmdlets; Get-Help [cmdlet] tells you what they do; Get-Member lists the properties and methods of an object; Get-PSDrive lists the PSDrives that are available to you. Knowing those cmdlets is enough to get you quite a distance.
The TechNet Script Center has a load of great resources for IT Pros at and there’s a fantastic community building around PowerShell, with a UK User Group (run by Richard Siddaway who is a PowerShell MVP – details on his blog), numerous PowerShell bloggers, and community sites. There are also a bunch of PowerShell books, most of which are pretty good, but if you’re just looking for one I’d recommend Lee Holmes’ PowerShell Cookbook.
If you don’t find that there’s support built in to products or PowerShell itself for what you want to do, there may be a 3rd party snap-in that could help. I’m making used of the free Active Directory cmdlets from Quest Software, the free Group Policy management cmdlets from SDM Software and the PowerShell Community Extensions – a large suite of additional cmdlets, providers, functions and more.
I’ll leave you with a quick PowerShell example. This is a cut down version of something that we used yesterday to enumerate the members of all the AD groups in a particular OU and save the listing for each group in a separate file named after the group:
Get-QADGroup -SearchRoot "OU=Groups,OU=ISS,DC=campus,DC=ncl,DC=ac,DC=uk" | %{$name = $_.name; Get-QADGroupMember $name | Out-File "$name.txt"}
It has probably wrapped in your browser, but that’s just with one line of PowerShell and frankly a good chunk of it is specifying the OU that we’re looking in! If you want to run that, you’ll just need to change the OU and have the Quest AD cmdlets installed. I won’t explain how it works here – I just wanted to show how much you can do with so little PowerShell. How much effort/code would it take to achieve that task another way?!
This summer all of our student user accounts will be provisioned entirely with PowerShell scripts. Keep an eye on this blog for future posts about PowerShell tools, resources and code samples.