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.
Read more »

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.
Read more »

We will describe in this post how to install ADCS on Windows 8 Developer Preview, and how to configure your PKI with Powershell.

Firstly we will install the ADCS role with Server Manager:

Read more »

I finally managed to free some time to install my first Windows 8 Developer Preview domain controllers in a test lab (thanks Vmdude). In this ldap389.local domain I installed two RWDCs named ldap389-pdce and ldap389-dc2, each one located in their own AD site. For the DC’s promotion you can read this two part post (here and here)

Once installation was completed, I launched the following Powershell command:

(get-module ActiveDirectory).exportedcommands

Read more »

In order to manage TMG with powershell you need to use the FPC.root COM object. For more details you can read this article. The purpose of this script is to export for each TMG server the Firewall Policies in XML format:

Read more »

We will describe in this post how to set up Threat Management Gateway in a domain located in the perimeter network (DMZ) in order to publish your Outlook Web Access external URL and ensure a secure SSL connection. The OWA site is installed on the CAS servers of your Exchange infrastructure. The internal URL, registered in your private DNS, is being accessed by the computers in your internal network which are members of your domain. The external URL, registered in your public DNS, is being accessed by any computer connected to the internet, which obviously is not necessarily a member of your domain. To get both internal and external URL launch the following command on the Exchange Management Shell:

Get-OwaVirtualDirectory | ft server,InternalURL,externalURL

Read more »

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.
Read more »

This script compares the updates approved between two WSUS target groups. It can ben useful when you want to get the differences between a test and a production group, you can read this Group Policy Central article to get more details on how to set up a WSUS test group using GPO (chapter Implement a WSUS Update Test Group of Computers).
Read more »

A quick word to tell you that I (finally) signed up on twitter. You will also find @ldap389 latest tweets on the blog’s sidebar (Twitter Updates widget), it replaces the old “Latest AD news” sidebar.

You can’t wait to install Windows server 8 developer preview in order to test it in the event of a future deployment… But you might want to finish your migration to ADDS 2008R2 before thinking about all that 😉 Bellow is a tab showing some client compatibility issues and the important steps when migrating your domain controllers to Windows server 2008R2:

Read more »