We will describe in this post how to connect to an Oracle database using Powershell cmdlets, this database hosts HR data. We will check if every employee has an Exchange 2010 mailbox. The common key between both systems (Oracle and Exchange) has to be a filterable attribute for performance issues when querying the Exchange mailboxes. Exchange’s attribute is CustomAttribute13 in our example and the corresponding Oracle value is HRCODE.
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We will see in this post some steps of a pentest against an ADDS domain. This pentest focuses only on the Microsoft System and does not take into account Antivirus, Firewall, IDS and IPS protections. The parts we describe in detail are scanning, exploitation and maintaining access. The pentest is performed with BackTrack 5 R3, you can download it here. The tools we use are Nmap, Nessus, Metasploit (the hacker’s framework, exploits are written in ruby), John the Ripper and Powershell. The pentest’s goal is to retrieve domain administrator credentials and maintain the access on the ADDS domain discretly.
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We will see in this post how to automate the AD database (NTDS.dit) offline defragmentaion with Powershell under Windows 2008 server. With Windows 2008 server, you no longer need to restart the DC in DSRM mode, you just need to stop the Active Directory service.
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We will describe in this post how to enable the mobile access to your mail system for only some employees. Only users who belong to the LDAP389-ACTIVESYNC will be able to use the ActiveSync protocol and set up their mailbox on their smartphone. This authorization will be managed by a Powershell script launched by a scheduled task.
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We will describe in this post how to make an inventory of your physical and VMWare virtual machines running Windows Server. For each virtual machine, we will also retrieve on which physical host the server is running. If you have a VMWare virtualized environment this script can be useful to help you decide which type of Windows server edition you need to purchase in order to lower your costs. For more information on how to license MS Windows Server in a VMWare environment you can read this article.
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When you setup a corporate Exchange mail system users can access their mailbox on most mobile devices (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone…) through the ActiveSync protocol. For blackberry owners to access your mail system, you need to setup a BES infrastructure.
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In this post we will discuss some issues we had when using Microsoft Management Consoles to manage DNS (dnsmgmt.msc), Group Policy Objects (rsop.msc, gpmc.msc) and AD accounts (dsa.msc). No, we don’t use just powershell or command line tools to manage a Microsoft infrastructure: We click a lot 🙂
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In this post we will describe how to make a WSUS clients inventory, we will search for the computers in your domain which are not able to receive MS security updates because they are not supported any more or because there is a misconfinguration on the WSUS client. Below is a tab listing supported OS and Service Packs versions:

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Repadmin monitors the replication in your Active Directory Forest, you can read this AskDs post about this tool. The command line “repadmin /replsum” helps you retrieve the global forest replication status. The data retrieved for a given Domain Controller is:

• Largest Delta: longest time since he successfully replicated all the Naming Contexts with his replication partners.
• Number of failed replications that occured for all the Naming Contexts (aka Directory Partitions) with his replication partners.

The purpose of the powershell script is to analyse DC’s inbound replication thanks to the command line “repadmin /replsum /bydest”. If there are RODCs in your domain they do not show up if you use the /bysrc switch. You can read this post if you need to know more about running the repadmin /replsum command in a domain with RODCs.

If for a given DC the “largest delta” exceeds a given threshold (in minutes), or there are replication failures, we will read on the RootDSE object the msDS-ReplAllInboundNeighbors attribute. With that information we will retrieve which replication partners and “Naming Contexts” that are having trouble to replicate. You can retrieve the same type of information with the “replsum /showrepl %dc_name% /csv” command line, but the data stored in the msDS-ReplAllInboundNeighbors attribute is in XML format, which easy and convenient to manipulate with Powershell.

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In this article we will describe how to search for a GPO matching several settings with Powershell. In this post and this one Lindsay Harris describes how to achieve this by exporting GPO reports in XML format and parsing the output. The principal advantage of her method is that you can input very precise search critera, but the disadvantage is that the script time processing can be very long because you need to export XML reports for every GPO in your domain. The method I will describe is more efficient in terms of script time processing but your search critera will be limited.

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