Fine-Grained Password Policy and non-expiring Passwords

The world is moving towards non-expiring passwords. Even Microsoft themselves seems to agree. Well, we came out with a nifty way (IMHO) to implement this in our organization. Firstly, we kept our default domain password expiration policy, then we set up fine-grained password policy and apply it to normal user account. The FGPP will lift the password expiry, and put in account lockout rules. This way, we can ensure that other special cases will get applied the default domain policy and have passwords expire as usual.

So all worked well, except for OWA, which still shows password expiry date based on default domain policy. This means that users will be bugged to change their passwords, when their passwords will not actually expire anyway.

There's no real solution for this. Even Microsoft themselves acknowledged this and offered a few workarounds, but those aren't really practical. One of their workarounds was to disable OWA's password change feature. This is not ideal, but still acceptable, so we decided to go with that.

But the problem doesn't stop there. EWS has included a new function in its API since 2010 SP1, GetPasswordExpirationDate, which also has the same behavior. As a result, all Mac Outlook clients (and any other client making use of this EWS call) will keep bugging our users with password expiry notification.

We still have no solution, but it's good to know the technical details.

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.

Changing the Primary and other emails for DirSync Office 365 users (with no exchange on premise)

OK, the idea is that if you are using DirSync for user objects on office 365, there is no way to change the SMTP address on office 365 portal. You can't even do it on the exchange management console, and you'll get almost the same luck if you try using Remote Powershell to O365 or even Exchange Management shell.

After hunting all around the community forums, I finally found a few good way we can do this via powershell (after all, you don't want to go mess with ADSIEdit if you're in an enterprise environment, having hundreds of accounts to provision or modify each day).

Simple method 1 (only set Primary Email - SMTP):
Using Remote PS, run the following command

Set-Mailbox user -WindowsEmailAddress user@domain.com

This is pretty good, as it just sets the primary email to what you want it to be, and forget about everything else. But if you are one who have exchange on premises, the "ProxyAddressess" field in your on premise, federating AD will overwrite that. So this is the only way to modify it:

Get-ADUser $sAMAccountName -properties ProxyAddresses | %{$_.ProxyAddresses += @('SMTP:primary@domain.com', 'smtp:secondary@domain.com'); Set-Aduser -Instance $_ }

For more complicated requirements, you may have to parse through the ProxyAddresses array to remove SMTP fields you don't want, add in smtp fields you want, etc. Maybe if I have some extra time in the future, I shall write a little helper script to do just that. I may even have a need to write such a script in the future, who knows ;-)

Mailbox enable a user in Office 365 using PowerShell

I was searching high and low for this all around the internet. Enable-mailbox doesn't seem to work, New-Mailbox also doesn't do it... It turns out that the solution is one that doesn't make sense at all.

Apparently all you need to do in Office 365 is to assign a license (an MsolAccountSku) to the user, and the mailbox will be automatically provisioned based on the UPN. That easy!

Here are the commands...

First, get your Account SkuID:
$sku = Get-MsolAccountSku

Then set a location for the user (else you can add a license):
Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName user@domain.onmicrosoft.com \
-UsageLocation "SG"

Then, add the account SkuID to the user:
Set-MsolUserLicense -UserPrincipalName \
user@domain.onmicrosoft.com -AddLicenses $sku.AccountSkuId

Then you wait as the mailbox is provisioned in the background.

ASP #include file Parent Paths error

Spent almost half a day trying to troubleshoot why some ASP scripts refuse to work when ported over from Windows Server 2003 to Win Server 2008 R2.

Turns out the offending line is this:
<!--#include file="../somefile.inc"-->

After a bit more google-ing, it's obvious that the problem lies in IIS 7.0 and above configuration that set Enable Parent Paths to False by default.

Solution was simple:

Go to IIS Manager, Default Web Site | (feature view) IIS | ASP | Enable Parent Paths = True