The first official non-BETA version of my Managed Service Account GUI tool is now available to download, and best of all it’s completely free!
Archives For Active Directory
Just thought I’d make a little video explaining how group policy works. This includes details of where GPOs are stored, how client side extensions are used, and a few general tips and tricks.
A free tool for creating and editing Managed Service Accounts, with no Powershell knowledge required. What is a Managed Service Account? They are a special type of domain account in Windows Server 2008 R2 that can be used to run Windows services, but unlike normal domain accounts you don’t have to keep changing the password to keep things secure – Active Directory will take care of managing the password for you and communicating this with the computer that is using the Managed Service Account (you don’t even have to restart the services for the password change to take effect). Pretty useful, but unfortunately the only way to create and configure these accounts is via Powershell… until now.
For the last week or so I’ve been working on a new application that will let you easily find services and scheduled tasks running on servers in your domain that are using a specific user account, then you can have the application change those credentials to use an updated password or a completely different account. More info and screenshots below…
I’ve been trying to find a way to script or automate the creation of a new Windows VPN connection that uses L2TP/IPSEC with a pre shared key and automatically uses the current user’s credentials, but it seems there is no way to do this using the CMAK, netsh, various powershell scripts, or GPO Preferences as none of them include all of the options we needed to set. So I have come up with a .NET app for doing this and am posting the code here in case it helps anyone else out.
Group Manager is a tool aimed at end users that allows them to edit group membership for any security or distribution groups that they are assigned as the manager of in Active Directory.