Today challenge : Domain Password policies and Fine-Grained P.P.

Hi Mates,
this is a new section that wants to describe, briefly, what happens every day in my technical-sysadmin life.
I don't want to bore you with complicate concepts but only to focus on a simple "adventure" that every day "stole" me sometime  (leaving also on me something that I had forgotten or that I didn't know).
Today I had to face up with a GPO in a customer Active Directory domain (Windows 2008 R2). Practically the customer told me that even if the value of the parameter "Minimum password age" was set to 0 she was not able to change repeatedly her password.
The core of the issue was that being her a SysAdmin she was added in a group (Shadow) part of the Fine-Grained Password Policy.

Powershell : retrieve external consultant list and send a report to the related internal reference manager

Hi mates,
few weeks ago a friend asked me to prepare a report that recaps every single external consultant situation.
For "situation" she meant some information that could help her to have a quick view on the status of the account, expiration date and who's internally responsible to "manage" the partner.
Having a lot of project "on going" she wanted to be sure that all nominal accounts have a related internal manager defined.
Since she usually put an expiration date for consultants she wants to be sure that every single manager receive, weekly, a report that
shows what's the current situation.

Powershell --> Powerquick : bulk change DHCP Scope Options

Hi mates,
few months ago a customer asked me to automate some changes on several DHCP server inside his network.
The objective was to change the DNS servers for at least 50 scopes......a lot....and do it manually seemed to be time consuming.
Few things.....nothing special.
Pay attentions that DHCP command in Powershell are available only with Windows 8.1 and Windows 2012.
First of all point a server and obtain the list of Scope ID......then....it's done !!!

Powershell --> Powerquick : search email alias and prepare for Exchange bulk migration

Hi mates,
few days ago a customer asked me to automate some steps of the exchange 2003 --> exchange 2010 migration.
Few things.....nothing special.
Point an OU, extract users list, retrieve their alias and then create the file to feed another part of the script that launch the move request.

It's mandatory to watch.....

Deep Web & Silk Road


Zero Days

DNS Poisoning : how it works, precautions and a quick demo

Hi mates,
few months ago some friends asked me some additional info regarding specific attacks that were done to redirect user traffic to a desired/different web site.
The attack is called DNS Poisoning and it's done, simply speaking, polluting the DNS cache of specific servers. More popular is the web site attacked, more amplified will be the impact.
In that way when a user will try to resolve the name of the website that he/she is asking for, the DNS will give him/she a different IP instead of the right one.(consider that the same approach could be used for mail system for example)

Powershell --> Powerquick : change Exchange 2003 user attributes

Hi mates,
a friend asked me if it is possible to manage specific parameters on his OLD Exchange environment.
Manage Exchange 2003 with Powershell is not possible...for sure is not possible as it is, conversely, with Exchange 2007 or newer versions.
So to modify, adjust, handle bunches of stuff you can leverage on Active Directory attributes.
Here below a quick example that shows how to change user quota for a specific group of user...logically if you want to do it with Powershell :