Saturday 17 May 2008

Storage VMotion Plugin for VI client

Got pointed in the direction of this at a VMWare seminar last week. Previous storage vmotion was only on the command line from a downloaded VM appliance.

The very nice guys at Lost Creations have developed a great GUI plugin for the same job.

Thanks guys!

Powershell on Server Core

So you thought you couldn't install Powershell on Windows Server 2008 Server Core install?

Don't think too soon, Dimitry has the answer for you!

This is unsupported, but great for a testing environment.

Tuesday 6 May 2008

More on Password Policies

As touched on in the previous post, doing a lot of work with password policies at the minute.

Say you need to find the date all the members of a group last changed their password, below is all you need to do:

Get-QADGroupMember 'domainname\groupname' | Get-QADUser -IncludeAllProperties | ft displayname,pwdlastset

The pwdlastset parameter will (obviously) give you the time and date the password was last checked. It's pretty straightforward moving on from there to start doing things like finding which of these users' passwords will expire shortly.

Password Policy Details / Updated Quest AD Cmdlets

Quest have released an updated version (1.1.0) of their AD cmdlets.

Published as part of the update is the ability to find details of the default domain password policy, previously a little tricky to get hold of.

A simple:

Get-QADObject domainname/ | format-list *

exposes the information you can obtain.

We've been doing a lot of work recently with password policies and

(Get-QADObject domainname/).MaximumPasswordAge

makes some of this work now a snap!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update:

Or even easier

(Get-QADRootDSE).Domain | Format-List Name, *Password*, *Lockout*

Name : springfield
MinimumPasswordAge : 7 days
MaximumPasswordAge : 90 days
PasswordHistoryLength : 10 passwords remembered
MinimumPasswordLength : 6 characters
LockoutDuration : 30 minutes
LockoutTreshold : 5 invalid logon attempts
ResetLockoutCounterAfter : 30 minutes

Thanks Mr Sotnikov!