Traceability is key when collaborating in the Active Directory (AD). Multiple admins changing and updating permissions and policies makes it difficult being compliant with the company’s policies. It is important to monitor mutations in the directory. By default audit policies are disabled for Domain Controllers (DC) and must be enabled explicitly. Enabling auditing for the DCs is quite easy, querying the logs for a specific event is a bit more difficult.
In this guide you’ll learn how to enable auditing for a specific case and how to query the audit logs for a specific event.
In terms of IT compliance having valid GPOs is essential. They must be update to date and the GPO directory should be free of any unlinked GPOs. Retrieving a list of unlinked GPOs in the management console is impossible. With PowerShell it is quite easy.
While preparing a Windows image for SCCM deployment I looked for a viable solution to remove Windows apps from the image. SCCM offers a lot options to execute this kind of action such as running a task sequence or install an application. But none of the options worked out for me. Either they were too complicated to configure or simply didn’t work as expected. Today I’ve found a script on TechNet seemed to a good solution. This script showed me how easy it is to mount a windows image and remove the app packages directory from it. However, the script was outdated and didn’t offer the option to remove only selected apps. That’s why I’ve created my own remix of the script.
“Manage the life cycle of your SCCM applications with PowerShell” is a short post series where I share my PowerShell experience with System Center Configuration Manager. In my last post I’ve shown you a script to distribute application content and deploy an application to its collections. In my final post I’ll show you the last part of the app life cycle - the termination.
“Manage the life cycle of your SCCM applications with PowerShell” is a short post series where I share my PowerShell experience with System Center Configuration Manager. In my last post I’ve shown you a script that creates applications and all assets required to deploy it. This time I have a script to distribute the application content and deploy the application to its collections.
“Manage the life cycle of your SCCM applications with PowerShell” is a short post series where I share my PowerShell experience with System Center Configuration Manager. In my last post I’ve showed you a script that creates the package source folder structure and another that adds the service users for SCCM. As mentioned these scripts have only been published for a better understanding of the follow-up scripts.
I’m currently planning and building a System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) infrastructure for a local hospital. SCCM is a complex system composed of various components to make the client and software life cycle management feasible. While configuring SCCM is a tedious job which is done once, managing applications is a recurring process. That’s why the application life cycle is the perfect candidate for scripted automation. With the most recent SCCM release Microsoft made it a lot easier to use the power of PowerShell. I’ve developed a few scripts which help creating, deploying and deleting SCCM applications. Configuring applications manually can be very bothersome and is always at risk for misconfiguration. The benefit for automation is huge.
This article reminded my of how stupid current password guidelines are and that we need to change that. A few months ago I wrote a random password generator function and decided that it needs an update to make the generated passwords more memorable.
