Get-ADUser -Filter crashes suddenly after 256 objects when filtering by Created (or other DateTime fields)

Today, I wanted to find newly created accounts in an OU. So I decided to run a simple Get-ADUser command:

$cutoff = [DateTime]"12-Aug-2014"
# Make sure we get the TimeZone correct. This is one of the reason I prefer to use the PowerShell Filter rather than the LDAPFilter
$cutoff = [DateTime]::SpecifyKind($cutoff, [DateTimeKind]::Local)
Get-ADUser -Filter {Created -gt $cutoff} -SearchBase "OU=Department,DC=contoso,DC=com"

Simple as that right? well, no!

It returned up to 256 accounts, and then generated an exception:

Category Info: Not Specified: (:) [Get-ADUser], ADException
FullyQualifiedErrorId: ActiveDirectoryServer:8256,Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Managment.Commands.GetADUser

This is obviously a bug, and until MS fixes it, we have to use the workaround instead:

Get-ADUser -Filter {whenCreated -gt $cutoff} -SearchBase "OU=Department,DC=contoso,DC=com"

Both "Created" and "whenCreated" are supposed to point to the same AD attribute, why one works and the other crashes is beyond me...

AD FS 2.0 and Shibboleth 2

Well, the story starts like this. Somehow my boss decided that we should stick to Microsoft technology when it comes to identity federation. And it so happens that AD FS 2.0 now supports Shibboleth albeit with some really get-your-hands-dirty manual tweaks. One of the major pain points is that we need to hand-edit the ADFS metadata XML file to be presented to the Relying Party. (If all these sounds like Navajo to you, google up Shibboleth, it's an interesting technology)

Anyways, time passed, and it's almost a year into our production deployment. Now, due to the yearly certificate rollover, we have a need to rebuild the Shibboleth XML metadata for our Relying Party. Having to do this once a year is just too risky for a production system, so I decided it's time to put my ASP.NET skills into good use again.

Well, the result was a simple MVC web application that loads the auto-generated metadata from ADFS default URL location, go some really hack-ish massaging to it, and spit out a well-formed XML metadata that Shibboleth 2.x SPs will happily parse. 

Also, this is the first time I'm using codeplex! ^.^

You can download the app package and source code here:
http://a2s.codeplex.com

Junos Pulse native VPN client on Win 8.1 (Advance configuration)

I just discovered another new thing about connecting to juniper networks SSL-VPN.

So the company I work for has multiple "sign on policy path" for our vpn, as the official documentation from juniper puts it. Normally, everyone is expected to go to the full official URL in the browser to connect to the VPN. Connection will require ActiveX, Java, and the right browser to start working.

Windows 8.1 came with a native VPN client, which was a good thing. But unlike the client in iOS, the server field does not take in a url. Hence, I can only connect to the default VPN path, but not to https://vpn.contoso.com/admin

Turns out, the way to do this is only through PowerShell. So let's get straight to the code:

$xml = '<pulse-schema><uri>/admin</uri></pulse-schema>'

$sourceXml = New-Object System.Xml.XmlDocument

$sourceXml.LoadXml($xml)

Add-VpnConnection -Name 'AdminVPN' -ServerAddress 'vpn.contoso.com' `

    -PluginApplicationID "JuniperNetworks.JunosPulseVpn_cw5n1h2txyewy" `

    -CustomConfiguration $sourceXml -SplitTunneling

The "SplitTunneling" is useful is you only want to route VPN network traffic through the adapter. For my case, the admin VPN of my organization doesn't have a gateway to the internet, hence split tunneling is necessary.

Turns out there are more configuration options for the XML. Here are those that are supported:

PowerShell, Task Scheduler, and Start in options

I just realised after lots of twist and turns that when scheduling a powershell job, the Start in value will not work if I just put the Program as "powershell.exe". If "Run with highest privileges" is checked, the working directory of your script will just be "C:\Windows\System32" regardless of what value you put in Start in. Just like it would if you launch powershell as administrator from the start menu. I haven't tried this, but I guess if it's not checked, the working directory should be %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%

To solve the problem, just change the Program value to the full path. In my case, this is "C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe". Quite a handful to type, but it's the only way I managed to get it to work so far. If there are any better suggestion, I'd be glad to hear.