Ivan's cloud and security blog
Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Defender ATP, security, DevOps and scripting
Ivan Dretvic Have you ever asked yourself how system administrators get around certain problems (cheaply, if not for free)? Simply put in a comment with what you would like to better understand and I will try my best to write an article about it.. So go on, give it a go. Add a comment of a problem … Read more
Here is a handy tip on how to force replication of Windows 2008 Domain Controllers using Repadmin. There is a GUI and a command line.
From time to time its necessary to kick off AD replication to speed up a task you may be doing, or just a good too to check the status of replication between DC’s.
There are several customisations that can be done to Exchange OWA so that the look and feel can be tailored to your company needs. The changes that are possible are:
At last Adobe have come to the party and released Adobe Flash 11 that comes as 32-Bit and the long awaited 64-Bit versions. This is great news to me because I can now try to use IE 64-Bit browser as my main browser.
Now we have to understand how to deploy Flash 11 using Group Policy for both 32 and 64 bit versions to your clients in a manageable way. This guide will be about deploying Adobe Flash ActiveX version, however the plug-in version would work just the same.
There is a new article which covers the auto-updating aspect of Adobe Flash for enterprise. Read it here:
https://ivan.dretvic.com/2012/05/deploying-adobe-flash-player-11-2-with-auto-updating-in-an-enterprise/
If you are an Exchange administrator you would most likely have hundreds of distribution lists in your organisation and no idea which ones are being used. Well I had this problem and decided to do something about it. I set out to see who was actually using these DL’s and remove all the ones that have not been used in months. I will be looking at Static DL’s. If you use Dynamic DL’s then the concept will be the same however some of the syntax may differ slightly.
Here are the steps I went through on a high level to identify and remove unused Distribution Lists in my Exchange 2010 SP1 environment:
In our network we have had a problem where a lot of our users never configured their Microsoft Office user details and simply accepted the defaults. In our case it was ‘Admin’ due to our SOE not accommodating for it.
Example of the data I am referring to:
My problem was I did not want to always “Run As…” all my important admin programs and mmc snap-ins all day because i didnt log on as an admin. It simply took up alot of my time and it frustrated me. What i really needed was a way to automatically (and securely) load all my administrative programs without having to enter any user names or passwords. Well i have a solution for anyone that had the same pain as i did.
The solution started off with the Free Elevation PowerToy found here where i used the elevation files in their original way, however i altered the original registry keys that go in the context menus along with the elevate.vbs to cater for certain anomalies.
This article has been superseded by a new article that includes Adobe Flash 11 (including 32Bit and 64Bit deployments)
https://ivan.dretvic.com/2011/10/adobe-flash-11-deployment-via-gpo/
So we need to update Adobe Flash for our users…again. With all the security vulnerabilities this one I like to keep on top of as much as I can even though it slips from time to time. Below is a quick summary of how I deploy Adobe Flash using Group Policy.
In brief i will document:
UPDATE: 18/11/2013 – I have an updated post on how to package and deploy Java 7 Update 45. Read them here:
Deploying Java 7 JRE – Deep Dive! (Part 1)
Deploying Java 7 JRE – Deep Dive! (Part 2)
I have documented the steps to package and deploy the latest (currently) version of Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment) with an MSI via Group Policy. Its a relatively easy task to do but due to information being scattered around the internet when I was doing it I thought I would do a write-up.
There is no wrong or right way of deploying software via Group Policies, however through my experience I now recommend using the below method because it is the most flexible.
The Key points about how I deploy GPO software: