Active Directory – Ivan’s cloud and security blog

Decomission a Windows 2003 or 2008 Domain Controller

5 January, 202127 May, 2013 by Ivan Dretvic

To decommission an Active Directory Domain Controller (Windows Server 2003/2008) is a fairly straightforward task so long as you make sure nothing is relying on that server specifically. I will cover off the demotions steps (fairly easy) but I will go through a checklist (and how-to) of gotchas that you might get caught out when doing this.

UPDATE: 27/09/2019 – Quick update to say that this is definitely the most popular comment on my blog. Thank you all for the all the comments, and please do keep them coming. The more comments i get, the more likely i will start to write articles again.

Automatically generate description field for computers in Active Directory

5 January, 20219 October, 2012 by Ivan Dretvic

Having worked in help-desk roles in the past I know the importance of knowing which user has logged onto which computer. Its simple stuff really, but unless you have 3rd party systems like System Center 2012 (SC12) or client agents, its either hard or time consuming to find out the relation between users and computers. What we needed was an easy way to find out what the last logged on user was for every machine.

How to decomission Blackberry Enterprise Server Express 5.0 from our Exchange 2010 environment

5 January, 202127 September, 2012 by Ivan Dretvic

It is inevitable that more and more organisations will be moving away from Blackberry more and more as the domination of iOS, Android and Windows Mobile continue to dominate the handset market. Well we have come to that point in now, where we have had a BES server running for over a year without a single user connecting to it, and now it is time to remove the server the right way.

After trawling through the labyrinth we call the internet it surprised me that finding all the information simply was not in the one place. Admittedly the uninstallation of BES is quite an easy task there are a number of tasks to do before and after… and ill show you what they are.

GAL photos in Exchange 2010

5 January, 202124 February, 2011 by Ivan Dretvic

So i started to look into the idea of adding photos of our staff to our GAL and thought I would note down some things i learnt on the way. The first i would suggest is to have a good read to the below 2 URL’s as they have documented quite well what you need to do and how to do it. I will go over the basic steps, and tips i learnt along the way.

GAL Photos in Exchange 2010 and Outlook 2010
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/03/10/454223.aspx
GAL Photos: Frequently Asked Questions
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2010/06/01/455005.aspx

My Comments

The word GAL and Exchange get thrown about a bit so its easy to get confused with where the image is being stored. It actually goes into Active Directory and is stored under thumbnailPhoto field as a hexadecimal. You can upload it a number of ways but i chose to use an Exchange powershell command.