Windows (12)

Additional Account Info in Active Directory

This old extension in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) MMC snap-in provides additional information called that is helpful in troubleshooting user accounts. The required acctinfo.dll reads the following values from the accounts attributes and presents the results under [Additional Account Info] tab within the users properties, including: Note: At…

Administration with PsExec

PsTools is a Swiss army knife for many System Administrators. One particular tool we will focus on is called PsExec, which allows you to execute commands on local and remote Windows computers. Note: A privileged account such as Domain Admins is required to be able to…

Automate Configuration Backups

While there are dedicated solutions that hook into network appliances to perform regularly backup of their state, namely their configurations, I devised a method using PowerShell and the built-in FTP service included with Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows. The requirements are light and this…

Automate login for Azure PowerShell

Introduction To automate logging into an Azure tenancy for PowerShell scripts, you would need to utilize a service account that doesn't have Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) enabled; we all know there are weaknesses to this but there are ways to mitigate the risks, including: Even limiting access this…

Changing Windows Editions

When installing Windows, the required features, technical requirements and roles needed will define which edition to choose, much like deciding which SQL Server instance type to install. There are significant licensing costs between Standard and Datacenter. Since Windows Server 2016 and onwards, there are minor…