In this post I will show an easy way to get the recursive group membership for the current user.

I use this in a logon script to handle certain tasks based on group membership.

Most scripts I see for this task do a manual recursive enumeration but in a large environment this could be very slow.

A better way would be to use the tokenGroups attribute of the Active Directory user object.

The tokenGroups attribute is an array of SIDs computed by Active Directory and is used to verify user access.

We need to translate these SIDs to their sAMAccountNames to get the actual group names.

In unmanaged code this could be accomplished by calling the DsCrackNames API or the IADsNameTranslate interface.

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I was creating an unattended Exchange 2007 install job today and while testing it, it failed with the following error:

Active Directory operation failed on nl-dc001.MYDOMAIN.LAN. The object ‘CN=Default Global Address List,CN=All Global Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=My Organisation,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=MYDOMAIN,DC=LOCAL’ already exists

I opened the Exchange System Manager and expanded the Tree (Recipient | All Address Lists | All Global Address Lists) and I found 2 Global Address Lists but not the Default Global Address List:

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I was trying to install HP Insight Control server deployment (previously called HP Rapid Deployment Pack) on Sql Server 2008 Express. I will just call it Deployment Server or DS from here.

I first installed SQL 2008 Express with Advanced Services and configured it to listen op Port 1433 as required by DS.

The installation of the first part (Deployment Server version 6.9.4) indicated a successfull install but the prereqisuites check of the Hotfix version 2.0 installer failed on the last step:

This was strange because I didn’t yet startup the console, so I decided to start it and close it as this would perhaps allow me to continue.

The next screen was a clear indication something went wrong:

I presumed that the ODBC connection was missing so I went to Adminstrative Tools | Data Sources (ODBC). But the ODBC connection was present. I then fired up SQL Server Management Studio which showed me the eXpress database was missing.
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I have written a small commandline tool that shows the Active Directory Property Sheet for a given account.

The Property sheet is what you get when you doubleclick an object in Active Directory & Computers. Basically this tool is meant to make it easy to quickly view or change properties without needing to start a GUI tool and looking up the account in the AD Tree.
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I needed to obtain the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for a given NetBios domain name. Eg from MYDOMAIN to dc=mydomain,dc=local.

I did some tests with the TranslateName API and if you append a \ to the domain name it returns the FQDN.

Here is a short example:

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Previously I discussed IDirectoryObject, today I will show how to change a user’s password with IDirectoryObject.

I didn’t find any documentation except a kb article describing how to use pure ldap to do it. Of course I could have used IADsUser::SetPassword but I decided not to because of the following reasons:

• IADs interfaces are terribly slow (although for one use you probably wouldn’t really notice).
• IADsUser::SetPassword tries 3 different methods to set the password (ldap over ssl, kerberos and finally NetUserSetInfo) which makes it even slower (most domain controllers do not have an ssl certificate) and unpredictable.

All example code I found was .NET based using the .NET wrappers for Active Directory and seemed to be meant for use in Adam rather than full Active Directory (it set port number to 389 and password mode to cleartext).

In the end it’s not very difficult but nonetheless it took me a while before I got it right.

We can write to the unicodePwd attribute which wants the password as a double quoted unicode string. If you look at this attribute with AdsiEdit you’ll see that the type is Octet String and that it can be written only.

I was tricked with Delphi’s QuotedStr function for a while because it doesn’t return a double but single quoted string

Below a small snippet from the upcoming JwsclActiveDirectory that shows how to use it: (more…)

Today I reused a unit I wrote a long time ago for TSAdminEx that shows Resource Dialogs from DLL’s or Executables. I wrote it for a couple of reasons:

• Reusing existing dialogs is conventient since the user already knows it.
• Windows takes care of translating it into the user’s language.
• I am too lazy to recreate them

The code is hardly rocket science and could probably be improved and made more sophisticated but it works for me. I decided to share it since you may find it usefull.

Here is a small usage example that shows the Reset Password dialog from Active Directory Users & Computers. This dialog is in dsadmin.dll (on Windows Vista/7 you will find it in ds.admin.dll.mui in the language subfolder eg %systemroot%\system32\en-US but you can load it using just the dll name).

It looks like this:

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Last time I talked briefly about IDirectoryObject and IDirectorySearch, let’s go into a little more detail today.

IDirectoryObject is an Interface that we can use to query anything in Active Directory, users, groups, organizational units, containers and so on.

I thought the best explanation would be to build a very small sample project, so let’s do that!

First we need some units, so please add the following units to your uses clause:

• ComObj (for EOleException and it calls CoInitialize for us)
• JwaWindows for the proper Adsi declarations

Next declare the following types:

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If you have ever used Adsi you have probably used the IADs interface or derived interfaces such as IADsUser or IADsGroup (maybe even without realising this).

What you need to know is that these interfaces were created to support scripting languages such as VBScript. The reason is that these scripting language have no support at all for structures such as ADSVALUE and don’t work with Pointers.

A typical use of IADs interface would look like this (in Delphi and using Jwa):

The IADs interfaces are fine when you are working with a single object but they are very, very slow, when working with many objects. I also find them a pain to work with as only a few AD attributes are present as properties. For other attributes you need to call the Get method which doesn’t always work, in which case you probably need to call the GetEx method. Even the GetEx method doesn’t always return the desired result as the property might not be in the Cache in which case we need to call the GetInfoEx method first and then Get or GetEx.

Active Directory has the nasty habit of failing when a an attribute is not set, so if you are reading a eg string attribute you probably expect an empty string but Active Directory returns a failure in such a case. And since Delphi declares Get(Ex) as SafeCall it will raise an Exception so you need to wrap it in try..except.

If we have obtained a value it will always be a variant that we probably need to convert to another type such as a string, datetime or an integer.

My results with implementing IADs interfaces in my Active Directory unit were bad: I wrote a test program that mimics Active Directory Users & Computer and enumerating a Container or OU with about 70 users takes 2-3 seconds. If you need to wait that long when expaning a Tree Node this in simply not acceptable. So I decided to completely drop the IADs interfaces and used the interfaces that are meant for higher level languages such as IDirectoryObject and IDirectorySearch. And guess what? Now my Delphi program, even when running in the debugger, is actually much faster than Active Directory Users & Computers!

To be fair to Microsoft, in the documentation of IDirectoryObject is the following note: The IDirectorySearch interface is a pure COM interface that provides a low overhead method that non-Automation clients can use to perform queries in the underlying directory.

In the next posts I will talk about IDirectoryObject and IDirectorySearch.

I am working on an Customer Management Console that will present all adminstrative tasks that customers will need in their environment in a single console.

It will handle Active Directory, Terminal Server and Citrix, Printers and will offer specific Views and Reporting. For the Active Directory stuff I decided to create some classes that enabled me to work with AD in a more Delphi OOP way.

In a series of Blog Posts I will write about interesting things or just random notes that I made while creating this stuff. The intention is to publish the whole unit in the Jedi Security Library when it’s finished.

Well I hope you that you’ll find some things of interest

Part 1 is here .