Fixing Home Directories with Powershell

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I had a customer that reported that some of his student’s home folders were missing and ending up on someone else’s account. This is a very bad thing when it comes to large school districts, as you could imagine. I identified the problem immediately and fixed it but that left us with a number of home directories that were already copied to new locations. I had to find the original owners of these directories and produce a list of the owner and the new directory name. In the process I also produced a list of the students where they had a home directory attribute set but the home directory was missing.
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Uploading Logitech Alert Security Video to Dropbox using PHP

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Some time ago my house was broken into. My wife had left for a quick walk at a nearby park with our dog and within 30 minutes, at 10:30 in the morning, some people broke through our side-entry garage door and stole anything electronic that they could carry, as well as loaded weapons in a small safe. When my wife came home they escaped out the garage door again, leaving the house a mess. After this incident we decided to get some security cameras.
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Automating and Controlling applications with VBScript

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VBScript is one of those programming languages that we all hate, but sometimes it’s the easiest one to throw together a solution for a specific problem. This could be anything from writing information to a file, listing AD accounts, to performing more complex user interaction. One of the neater tricks to VBScript is its ability to control running applications.
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Export Exchange Mailboxes to PST using Powershell

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Exporting mailboxes can be useful when an employee or user leaves the workplace. You may want to archive all of the files on a fileserver and delete the old mailbox. Here I will give you the commands and resources to export the mailbox to a PST and to know what to expect before you run into an error. Continue reading →

Displaying user accounts in an AD Domain using PHP and UMRA

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This article describes how to configure a UMRA project to query an Active Directory domain for all users and return the list with additional information to a PHP website. The website will read the table of user information and display the results.
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Integrating Real-Time SQL Triggers to manage Active Directory Accounts with UMRA

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Triggers allow a set of SQL code to run on several types of SQL actions, such as INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. For instance, upon an INSERT, the SQL engine will call the trigger configured for the INSERT action. The trigger specified will have programming logic to perform actions on other systems. With OLE Automation enabled in SQL, the trigger will have the ability to perform actions using COM objects. Continue reading →

AD GUIDs (UUIDs) – “friendly” vs. “non-friendly” hex

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A colleague of mine asked a very good question about user GUIDs stored in Active Directory. He noticed that a GUID (objectGUID in adsiedit) is displayed in the format: ffffffff-ffff-ffff-ffff-ffffffffffff (8-4-4-4-12), but when shown in the attribute editor it’s displayed in the standard hexadecimal form “FF FF FF FF…”. An automation program we work with displays it in a different format: “fffffffffffff…”. Why are these GUIDs displayed in different formats? Continue reading →