Exporting User account information from AD to Excel

Filed Under (Windows Networking) by Just An Admin on 13-06-2008

Our Active directory is, like with many other, the source of user information. You should think of address information, function/department. Every now and then the account information is verified and when in doubt, discussed. Having the information in a human readable form, such as an Excel sheet, makes it so much easier. The script below will export all user info from the Active Directory to an Excel sheet. Just run from a computer connected to the your domain with a user that is allowed to query the AD and watch the magic (gives me a smile every time is see it run).

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Windows Password, Please!

Filed Under (Windows Networking) by Just An Admin on 05-06-2008

For all administrators that find themselves in the situation where local administrator accounts or passwords from local accounts on a WIndows system are ‘lost’, there is light at the end of the rainbow…

RainbowCrack is a general propose implementation of Philippe Oechslin’s faster time-memory trade-off technique. In short, the RainbowCrack tool is a hash cracker that can be run from a CD. A traditional brute force cracker try all possible plaintexts one by one in cracking time. It is time consuming to break complex password in this way.

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SharePoint 2007 Search, searching for better…

Filed Under (SharePoint 2007) by Just An Admin on 27-05-2008

With the migration to MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0 finished, we found that the search functionality is not what we have hoped for, at least not ‘out-of-the-box’. No wildcard support, no standard grouping of results… And since i do not have the skills to ‘build’ it myself, i was kind of forced to accept the lack of functionality, purchase a third party app or hire a programmer to do the job me.

Then again, if a product, like SharePoint 2007, lacks features or functionality but allows for customized extensions or add-ons, it’s just a matter of time until alternatives or enhancements surface. Ontolica, famous for providing just such features to SharePoint, offers a paid solution to fill this gap. They even offer one ‘module’ for free that is discussed on various blogs and websites: Ontolica wildcard search.

But there are other, less commercial solutions that deserve to be looked at:

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Inventory computer serial numbers during logon

Filed Under (Windows Networking) by Just An Admin on 23-05-2008

Why did we write this script? IBM allows us to get the warranty status of our IBM systems and how long the warranty lasts. It also enables us to check if the extended warranty was registered correctly.

Lookup for a single system
Lookup for multiple systems

The compilation of a list or input file that contains the required fields for a ‘multiple systems lookup’ wasn’t as easy to do as we had hoped.

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Getting to grips with password expirations!

Filed Under (Windows Networking) by Just An Admin on 14-05-2008

Every two months user start calling or e-mailing the helpdesk to request a reset of their Active Directory account. Because a lot of users work at customer locations, they miss the warning about their expiring account. A former collegue brought the following script to my attention, which automaticly sends users a warning message when their password is about to expire. Allthough nearly perfect, some little adjustements have been made:

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