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Showing posts from July, 2019

What if I'm asked to provide a list with users from active directory that have not logged on for "X" days, for cleaning purposes ?

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Hey guys !! How are you doing today ? Today we are going to talk about one very common situation that most of us get quite frequently. How to come up with a list of users that have not logged on for "X" days. From time to time, we should clean stuff up and many times, it is hard to keep AD database clean due to a number of facts that is out of control of the IT department. People leave company, get fired and not all times, IT department get notified in the way it should. You may end up with a bunch of disabled accounts but maybe, not all of them get moved to a disabled OU, or even get deleted when time comes, if company policy allows for account deletion. Powershell can help us to get a comprehensive list of users that have not logged on for whatever number of days make sense in your environment. There are tons of powershell scripts out there that can do this for you but one thing that is very important to understand is that, there are two attributes that can c

Certification or Degree ??

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Hi guys !! I hope you are doing great and enjoying summer (at least for Northern Hemisphere folks). I know my friends in Brazil are struggling with a super cold winter (10 C/50 F ??). Oh !!! I'd love having a winter "that" cold here in Montreal but, anyways. So, today I'd like to talk about certification or degree. In IT, which one is more important ? People have different thoughts about this topic and I think there is no wrong or right. It depends on your situation. I personally tend to agree that , perhaps, having both is the best as you could benefit from the great things both of them can give to you but, if you can't afford having both, I'd tend to agree that keeping your certifications up to date is probably better than having only a degree. Let me tell you why I believe in this. I have an associate's degree in computer networking that was achieved in 2009. My first certification, I got in 2009. I got started in the certification world wi

What if I am asked to provide last time a particular attribute was modified in Active Directory ?

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How to detect when and on which DC a particular AD object attribute was last modified ? Well, as part of our job, as a SysAdmin, from time to time you may get requests from people that want to know when a particular modification was made to an AD object. For instance, the mail attribute was modified on an account and it caused an issue to the user. When you are doing a RCA (Root Cause Analysis), you may be asked to identify when the attribute change was made so you can know when the problem occurred. So, this is something that you can achieve by executing a simple command : Repadmin. :) Although you can't see when all changes were made, you can check date and time of the last change that was made to a particular attribute. Here is what you need to do: Prerequisites Powershell where Active Directory module is loaded; Repadmin command line(depending on the machine you are running this from , you may need to get RSAT installed so Repamin can be available); The AD object y

My first post...

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Hello everyone !! This is my first post and since I'm a newbie here, please be patient ! :) I am a passionate IT professional who has been in the field for over 15 years. I am one of the few IT guys I know that is passionate about technology and who is not a fan of Star Wars, nor coffee. Yeah , I know, I may have frustrated you but it's is true. Although I have to admit, I am becoming addicted to French Vanilla coffee. Anyways, I want to leverage this space to, hopefully, provide useful content for you hoping this can help you solving issues that you may have and also, leverage this platform to learn from you guys as well. As I am originally from Brazil, although I've been living in Canada since 2012, I will also provide a Portuguese version of my posts so people who are not so comfortable with English, can benefit from this as well. But, guys, if you do not speak English yet, please, make an effort to learn it because it will take your career to the next lev