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.

Lync 2013 Client With OCS Registry Hack, The PowerShell Way

I have been formatting my desktop quite a bit these days. And I realised that each time I format, I need to do all the usual stuff and hacks to get things working the way it did. One of them, is of course, the registry hack to get Lync 2013 to connect to the OCS server at my company.

So I decided to do this the powershell way. Turns out it was just 2 really simple commands:

New-Item HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync -Force
New-ItemProperty HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Lync -Name DisableServerCheck -Type DWord -Value 1

Do remember that you have to run PowerShell with Administrator rights.

UPDATE: Now that skype for business 2016 is launched, it's time to update the script a little. Use this one below instead.

New-Item HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync -Force
New-ItemProperty HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Lync -Name DisableServerCheck -Type DWord -Value 1

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.

Of PowerShell, dotNET, and unblocking DLLs

I've been trying like crazy to get my System.data.SQLite to load into Powershell. I tried all the versions, checked and double checked versions and dependencies...

At the end, the solution was super simple. Right-click, properties on the downloaded zip package, and click UNBLOCK. Damn you security feature, wasted half a day just figuring this out!