Windows 8 Release Preview, PowerShell 3.0 and Windows Server 2012 Release Candidates – All the Links You Need

Yesterday Microsoft posted the Release Preview of Windows 8 for download. You can go and get the setup executable from:

Download Windows 8 Release Preview

If you want ISO images so you can prep some removable media, you need to go to:

Windows 8 Release Preview ISO images

Once you’ve installed the Windows 8 Release Preview, if you’re one of those lucky, lucky people who spends their day managing Windows Server, you’ll also want to get these:

Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 8 Release Preview

If you’re one of the enlightened people who uses Windows PowerShell, but you can’t upgrade to Windows 8 RP just yet, then you can still get the version 3.0 Release Candidate goodness on Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1:

Windows Management Framework 3.0 – RC

If you’re looking to try the Release Candidate of Windows Server 2012, then you want to go to:

Download Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC) Datacenter

Lots of new fun things to play with. Thank goodness we have a long holiday weekend to be able to get all this installed! 🙂

Restoring permissions on an AD objects to Domain/Enterprise Administrators

I recently accidently set added Authenticated Users = Deny Read on GPO object. As ‘Deny’  ACEs take priority over ‘Allow’ everyone was blocked including Domain and Enterprise Administrators!

After some research, trial and error we found that the following procedure can be used to restore permissions back to Domain Administrators.

  1. Log on the PDC emulator as Domain Admin.
  2. Get the DN of the problem object(s)
  3. Run an elevated command prompt
  4. Run dsacls <dn> /R “DOMAIN\Domain Admins”
  5. Run dsacls <dn> /G “DOMAIN\Domain Admins”:GA
  6. Locate the system object in the AD. GPOs are in the System Container.
  7. Restore permissions for the object.
  8. Check the  object’s folder within SYSVOL and verify the permissions are up to date. If not then restore the permissions here too (I actually did this between 5  and 6 but according to Internet sources step 7 will do this).

Our Journey to the Cloud (Office 365): Part 2 – Technical Overview

This post outlines the technical steps on the road to implementing our Federated Office 365 with SSO and Exchange Hybrid Deployment. Each of these steps will be expanded upon in subsequent posts.

About Our Environment

Active Directory

Our Active Directory Forest consists of three Domains. An ‘empty’ Forest Root Domain fangorn.ncl.ac.uk (this was best practice when the Forest was created), a resource domain ‘campus.ncl.ac.uk’ which contains all objects used to manage the campus in Newcastle UK. There is also a third domain which is used to manage computer objects at our campus in Malaysia. For the purposes of deploying Office 365 we can ignore this last domain.

Our DNS namespace .ncl.ac.uk runs on a UNIX BIND system and domain controllers for the zones mentioned above have delegated authority for these subdomains. The Forest and all domains are running at Server 2008 R2 Functional level.

Mail

We run a mixture of Exchange 2007 SP2 and Exchange 2010 SP2 and are in the midst of migrating our staff and postgraduate research students to Exchange 2010.  Exchange 2007 remains on SP2 due to an incompatibility with a third-party archiving solution.  All Exchange servers are separated by role (CAS, HUB and MBX) and generally multiple instances for site-based resilience.  The Exchange Client Access infrastructure is fronted by a hardware load balancer.

Office 365 Tenancy Configuration

Configuring the Office 365 tenancy involved running the Office 365 deployment readiness tool and contacting Microsoft in order to have the tenancy located in the appropriate location relative to the number of users (size of the organisation). Another important step at this stage is proof of ‘ownership’.

Active Directory Federation Services Configuration

Federation of the Active Directory means that users can access services in Microsoft Office 365 using the existing Active Directory credentials (user name and password). Just as importantly this means we can use our existing User lifecycle, provision and access configuration tools to manage users using both cloud and on premises services.

The setup of Identity Federation and single sign-on (SSO) for Office 365 requires Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS).

Directory Synchronisation Configuration

The Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronisation Tool (DirSync) establishes a one way synchronization from the on-premise Active Directory Forest (all domains) to Microsoft Online.

Dirsync is a requirement for running an Exchange Hybrid Deployment and allows global address list (GAL) synchronization from the on premises Microsoft Exchange Server environment to Microsoft Exchange Online.

Exchange Hybrid Deployment Configuration

An Exchange Hybrid Deployment refers to the full-featured deployment of a cross-premises Exchange messaging solution with Office 365 for enterprises and Exchange Online.

The features that an Exchange Hybrid Deployment delivers are:

  • Mail routing between on-premises and cloud-based organisations
  • Mail routing with a shared domain namespace. For example, both on-premises and cloud-based organisations use the University’s standard @newcastle.ac.uk SMTP domain.
  • A unified global address list, also called a “shared address book”
  • Free/busy and calendar sharing between on-premises and cloud-based organisations
  • Centralised control of mail flow. The on-premises organisation can control mail flow for the on-premises and cloud-based organisations.
  • A single Outlook Web App URL for both the on-premises and cloud-based organisations
  • The ability to move existing on-premises mailboxes to the cloud-based organisation
  • Centralised mailbox management using the on-premises Exchange Management Console (EMC)
  • Message tracking, MailTips, and multi-mailbox search between on-premises and cloud-based organisations

Implementation

The team responsible for the implementation of Office 365 is the ISS Infrastructure Systems Group with our very own John Donaldson managing the project. A steering group with student representation provides strategic direction and sign-off.

Our broad testing and implementation strategy are the creation of two test environments followed by production.

POC Environment: A simple proof of concept comprising of a single domain with the minimal infrastructure required for to test the concepts of Federated Office 365 with SSO and Exchange Hybrid Deployment.

Full Test Environment: A fully virtualised environment which mimics (as closely as possible) our production environment. This environment will be maintained in tandem with the production environment and any future changes will be tested here first.

Painless document sharing/collaboration with change control

We’ve offered the ISS Subversion Service for some time now, allowing groups of people to share and collaborate on groups of files whilst maintaining full change control. The only downside to this service is that it generally requires the users to have at least some idea of the concepts behind version control systems.

I’ve recently discovered an interesting open-source software project called SparkleShare which provides the same functionality to groups of people working on the same set of files but manages the change control work in the background, using a client similar to the Dropbox client. Changes to files get automatically committed into the repository and synced to all users. The SparkleShare client is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux and uses a git repository as the backend store. As git is available on “aldred”, our Linux public time sharing server, you can use an ISS Unix account as a git repository for a group using SparkleShare.

After installing the client, simply paste the contents of the key file in your SparkleShare main folder into your Unix ‘.ssh/authorized_keys’ file. Then create a new git repository in your Unix home directory (eg: git init --bare ~/myfirstrepo) and then in the SparkleShare client add a new project with address ssh://userid@aldred.ncl.ac.uk and remote path ~/myfirstrepo. Done!

Windows Server 2012 Virtual Labs

When it releases later this year, Windows Server 2012 will bring a stack of exciting new features and enhancements, like the fantastic multi-server management features of the new Server Manager, and of course PowerShell v3.0!

If you want to get ahead of the curve on Server 2012, then there’s no better way that digging in and getting your hands dirty, although not everyone has a whole load of spare hardware to setup a test lab, and even if you do, then it’s sometimes difficult to know where to start, especially since pre-release software tends to be lacking some of the documentation that you might want to really explore a feature in depth.

To that end, Microsoft have produced a load of Windows Server “8” Beta Virtual Labs (put together before the Windows Server 2012 name was announced). These are self-contained modules focusing on the following:

  • Active Directory Deployment and Management Enhancements
  • Configuring a Highly Available iSCSI Target
  • Configuring Hyper-V over Highly Available SMB Storage
  • Implementing Storage Pools and Storage Spaces
  • Introduction to Windows PowerShell Fundamentals
  • What’s New in Windows PowerShell 3.0
  • Managing Branch Offices
  • Managing Network Infrastructure
  • Managing Your Network Infrastructure with IP Address Management
  • Managing Windows Server “8” with Server Manager and Windows PowerShell 3.0
  • Online Backup Service
  • Using Dynamic Addess Control to Automatically and Centrally Secure Data

In addition, you might want to check out some of the Resources for IT Professionals that Microsoft have published in relation to the TechEd conference that will start in a month in Orlando.

(Thanks to my friend @Alexandair for both of those links)

Office 365/ADFS 2.0: Forms AND Integrated Authentication (SSO) based on the user agent string

Background

The ADFS Farm + ADFS Proxy Farm model that we are using for Office 365 requires that the CNAME of the ADFS service has to be the same for both the ADFS proxy server farm and the internal ADFS farm (in our case adfs.ncl.ac.uk). Users ‘inside’ our network need to be directed to the internal farm and external users to the proxy farm.

ADFS supports multiple authentication mechanisms including the ones we are interested in, Windows Integrated Authentication (WIA) and Forms Based Authentication (FBA). It seems however that there is no way to dynamically select which one is used when a request hits the farm based on client properties. Where Office 365 is concerned a farm uses WIA or FBA

The way our network is configured means that we do not have the network model of Internal/DMZ/Internet with the split-brain DNS that the Microsoft documentation seems to expect. Our systems point at a single zone (running on BIND) which is resolves both internal and external requests.  As such, private IP addresses such as that of the internal ADFS Farm can be resolved (but obviously not connected to) from the Internet.

Working with our Network team we were able to get around this by creating a work around in BIND so that anyone on the Internet receives the address of the proxy farm and anyone coming from one of our internal IP ranges receives the address of the ADFS farm.

The problem for us is that only around 70% of our internal clients are domain joined and as such able to take part in SSO using WIA. The other devices may be non-Windows machines, non-domain joined Windows machines and mobile devices. Because they are coming from one of our internal address ranges they are directed to the internal WIA enabled ADFS farm and get a non-user friendly ugly pop-up box requesting authentication.

Authentication Popup

We do not think that this is a good user experience so we sought a solution which would let us provide both authentication methods to internal clients.

Possible solutions

After discussions internally and with Microsoft we were presented with 3 possible ways to deal with this problem.

  1. Our Network team could define every IP range we have and point them at the relevant BIND DNS view. This is obviously an inelegant solution and would not cover all scenarios as many ranges in our environment contain both domain joined and non-domain joined clients. It would however work for wireless guests as they are on specific ranges.
  2.  Microsoft proposed pushing out a HOSTS file to all domain joined clients pointing them at the internal farm. This not a scalable or suitable option in our environment as we have development work going on all over the University and this would essentially remove people’s ability to use the HOSTS file due to it being overwritten by whatever mechanism we would put in place to the job
  3. The third option was suggested by a Microsoft representative on the Office 365 community forums. The ADFS Farm could be configured to read a custom attribute from the browsers User agent string.This value would be parsed server-side and if present the request would be authenticated by WIA. Other requests would be forwarded on to FBA.  This was particularly attractive to us as we already use a custom user agent string value for Shibboleth authentication.

What we lacked was the expertise to implement this solution but thanks to collaboration with our colleagues as well as working with members of the Microsoft TechNet community we were able to implement something that seems to do the job for us. We thought we would share this in the event others are running in to the same problem!

Out of the Box Authentication with ADFS 2.0

The mechanism that is used by default on an ADFS farm or proxy Farm can be toggled in the <localAuthenticationTypes> element of the ADFS web.config

<microsoft.identityServer.web>
 <localAuthenticationTypes>
 <add name="Forms" page="FormsSignIn.aspx" />
 <add name="Integrated" page="auth/integrated/" />
 </localAuthenticationTypes>

For WIA ‘Integrated’ is at the top of the list:

<microsoft.identityServer.web>
 <localAuthenticationTypes>
 <add name="Integrated" page="auth/integrated/" />
 <add name="Forms" page="FormsSignIn.aspx" />
 </localAuthenticationTypes>

Implementing Selective Authentication using the user agent string

Manipulation of the User Agent string on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome

The first thing required is to append the user agent string to browsers. This can be done in Internet explorer using Group Policy

  1. Under User Configuration expand Windows Settings/Internet Explorer Maintenance
  2. Select ‘Connection’
  3. In the right-hand pane, double-click User Agent String.
  4. On the User Agent String tab, select the ‘Customize String To be Appended To User Agent String check box
  5. Type in the string (in our case campus-ncl).

We have this value set in the ‘Default Domain Policy’ though it could be set lower down.

For Firefox and Chrome things have to be done in the application deployment package. Obviously people will have to use a managed version of the product as it’s not exactly a user friendly setup!

In Firefox the prefs.js file requires to extra lines:

user_pref("network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris", "<ADFS FQDN>");
user_pref("general.useragent.override", ",<actual agent string> <customstring>")

So in our environment:

user_pref("network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris", "adfs.ncl.ac.uk");
user_pref("general.useragent.override", ",<actual agent string> campus-ncl")

Chrome needs to be run with some extra switches:

--auth-server-whitelist="ADFS FQDN" --user-agent=" <actual agent string> + <customstring>

So in our environment

--auth-server-whitelist="adfs.ncl.ac.uk" --user-agent=" <actual agent string> + campus-ncl"

Disable Extended Protection must be disabled on the ADFS Farm in IIS (for Firefox and Chrome only)

In order to get SSO working with Firefox and Chrome Extended Protection must be disabled on the ADFS Farm in IIS. Lots of information on this feature and the consequences of disabling it can be found with a simple Google search.

ADFS Farm modifications

There are 2 steps required on the ADFS farm.

  1. Enable Forms Based Authentication as the default method.
  2. Modify the FormsSignIn.aspx.cs source code file

To turn on FBA edit the <localAuthenticationTypes> element of the ADFS web.config file and make sure FBA ‘Forms’ is at the top of the list:

<microsoft.identityServer.web>
 <localAuthenticationTypes>
 <add name="Forms" page="FormsSignIn.aspx" />
 <add name="Integrated" page="auth/integrated/" />
 </localAuthenticationTypes>

Next open the FormsSignIn.aspx.cs Source Code File.

The default out of the box, the code looks like this:

using System;

using Microsoft.IdentityServer.Web;
using Microsoft.IdentityServer.Web.UI;

public partial class FormsSignIn : FormsLoginPage
{
 protected void Page_Load( object sender, EventArgs e )
 {
 }
…

We need to add some code to the Page_Load event which will forward the request to integrated authentication if the campus-ncl user agent string is present. In order to do this we had to add System.Web to the namespace list.

using System;
using System.Web;
using Microsoft.IdentityServer.Web;
using Microsoft.IdentityServer.Web.UI;

System.Web supplies the classes that enable browser-server communication which are needed to get the user agent string and the query string generated by Microsoft Online Services.

protected void Page_Load( object sender, EventArgs e )
 {
 //Get the raw query String generated by Office 365
 int pos = Request.RawUrl.IndexOf('?');
 int len = Request.RawUrl.Length;
 string rawq = Request.RawUrl.Substring(pos + 1, len - pos - 1);

 //Convert query string (qs) to a string
 string qs = HttpUtility.ParseQueryString(rawq).ToString();

 //Get the user agent value
 string uagent = Request.UserAgent;

 //Check if the string campus-ncl appears in the User Agent
 //If it is there forward to WIA along with the Query String

 if(uagent.IndexOf("campus-ncl") > -1)
 {
 Response.Redirect("/adfs/ls/auth/integrated/?" + qs, true);
 }
 else
 {
 //Carry on and do Forms Based Authentication
 }
 }

And that’s it! Anyone using a managed browser with the custom string will be forwarded for WIA and get the SSO experience and all others will get FBA.

Things to note

  1. This method is not officially supported by Microsoft and there are potential issues around future ADFS upgrades (there is no guarantee that the same configuration will be in future versions of ADFS). We are also developing the fall back plan of pointing different clients and the different farms in DNS in case it is needed.
  2. There may very well be a better way to do this! If you find one please let us know 🙂

Special mention

Although we knew what we wanted to do we were having trouble getting the query string and putting it in a usable form (I’m not a programmer!) This information was provided by another TechNet forum member

 

From ISG to the World

After a while of only being available internally, the new Infrastructure Systems Group blog is now available to the world at large on blogs.ncl.ac.uk/isg (if you were using the internal wordpress URL, you might want to update your RSS reader).

If you are just finding this blog for the first time, this is what you can expect…

  • Our group manages both Windows and Unix/Linux infrastructure, so we will have cross-platform posts.
  • Some of our content will be specific to our systems at Newcastle University, but the majority should be relevant to other organisations.
  • We are currently in the process of migrating some services to Office 365 – we’ll be reporting on that progress in quite a bit of detail, to aid others doing the same later.
  • There’s a lot of legacy content here that was from the old Windows Infrastructure Team blog. Some of that may have been slightly more partisan, OS-wise – sorry about that 😉
  • While we are very serious about the systems we run, we are not without humour, so there may be some of that too!

We hope you find our posts interesting and we look forward to your comments.

SkyDrive users – act now to keep 25GB for free

Microsoft have announced changes to Windows Live SkyDrive, introducing paid tiers of storage and reducing the free offering down to 7GB. Existing users can (for a limited time) login and hit a button to keep the 25GB that you currently have, for free.

Go and do that now: skydrive.live.com

Once you’ve done that, you might want to download the long-awated SkyDrive client applications that have been released for Mac and PC.

PowerShell On-Ramp

Last week I was up in Edinburgh with Microsoft presenting at their IT Pro Camps. We had multiple mentions how PowerShell can help you with the managment in the three topic areas we were covering: Hyper-V, Private Clouds and Consumerisation (supporting BYOD scenarios). Taking the audiences for those three days as a representative sample, it looks like about half of the Windows-based IT community still hasn’t begun their PowerShell journey.

Now is a great time to get started with PowerShell, especially with its increased prevalence in Windows Server 2012 and some of the great improvements in PowerShell 3.0. For those just getting started, I’m encouraging everyone to get familiar with the following four cmdlets (pronounced “command-lets”) in particular:

Get-Command finds all the commands (including aliases and functions) that are available to you in the current shell.
Get-Member tells you about the objects on the pipeline which the previous cmdlet has output. eg. Get-Process | Get-Member
Get-Help provides help about cmdlets and features of PowerShell (in v1 and 2 this is all in the box; with PowerShell 3.0, you need to Update-Help).
Get-PSDrive tells you about the drives that PowerShell is exposing; not just the file system, but the registry and others.

Given those four cmdlets, you can get a long way by yourself, just through experimenation. Don’t forget to use the -whatif parameter (or -confirm) on any cmdlet that might change something.
eg. Get-Process | Where {$_.name -match “^s”} | Stop-Process -whatif

In PowerShell 3.0, you can benefit a lot from using the Show-Command UI in the PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment) to help you with the parameters required to achieve a task. As a beginner to PowerShell, you can also learn a lot by looking at other people’s scripts; the Microsoft Script Explorer for Windows PowerShell is a useful tool to find scripts and other great resources from online repositories.

There’s no better way to learn PowerShell than to write some scripts that solve real problems, and there are a number of pre-canned problems that you can take a shot at in the Windows PowerShell Scripting Games. You’re too late to enter this year’s competition, but you can still try out the challenges, and once you’ve given it a try, you can see the expert solutions from some of the top members of the PowerShell Community.

I suggest that while you’re getting used to PowerShell, you print a couple of quick reference guides (or cheat sheets) and keep them close to hand, or pinned up beside your monitor. You can also download a great free ebook called Mastering PowerShell from PowerShell.com, where you’ll also find a bunch of other great resources (including another free ebook on PowerShell remoting, for when you’ve got to grips with the basics).

If you like to go and buy a book, then the beginner’s book of choice is Don Jones’ Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches.

Accessing UNIX files from Windows

Those who use our UNIX services (for example, web publishing or the aldred time-sharing server) often need an easy way to access their UNIX files from a Windows (or Mac) computer.  This is where the ISS Samba service steps in by allowing SMB/CIFS access to your UNIX files.

If you’re using a Windows common desktop computer on campus, you’ve already been authenticated and can access your files immediately. In Windows, go to StartRun (or Start,Search Box in Vista/Windows 7) and enter:

\\isssmb1\username

(Replacing username with your user ID.)

After a couple of moments your UNIX home directory will appear in a new window.

You can make the connection permanent and assign it to a drive letter so that your UNIX home directory will be available every time you log in. To do so, click Start, right click on My Computer and choose Map Network Drive. Choose a drive letter, enter the path as above and choose whether or not to make the mapping permanent.