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Azure AD/Active Directory User Security Evaluation Reporter

During December 2018 – February 2019 Microsoft have run an online Microsoft Graph Security Hackathon on Devpost.

The criteria of the hackathon was;

  • Build or update a functioning Microsoft Graph-powered solution that leverages the Microsoft Graph Security API

Following the announcement of the Hackathon I was encouraged by Kloud management to enter. During the busy month of December I started to formulate a concept for entry in the Hackathon taking learnings from the hackathon I entered in 2018. Over the Xmas holiday period I started working on my entry which continued into January and February at nights and weekends.

Problem

A Security Administrator within an Organisation enables security related configuration options on an Azure Tenant to implement security controls that align an organisation with Microsoft recommendations and best practice.

The Azure Security Score provides an evaluation on the alignment of an organisation with best practice, however to some extent it still requires end users to have the right configuration for security related elements of their profile. But as a Service Desk Operator or Cyber Security Officer there isn’t a single view of a user’s security posture that can give you an individual user security score summary. My solution……

Microsoft User Security Evaluation Reporter (USER)

Microsoft User Security Evaluation Reporter (USER) is an Azure AD and Active Directory tool for use by the Service Desk and Cyber Security Officers to get instant visibility of an organisations Azure Security Score that allows them to then evaluate current risks within an organisation right down to individual users.

When the Microsoft USER loads the current Azure Security Score is retrieved, evaluated and displayed for alignment with Microsoft Recommendations. Also, on load the last 5 Active Security Risk Events are displayed.

Microsoft USER Recent Risk Events and Azure Secure Score.PNG

The Service Desk Operator or Cyber Security Officer can select one of the recent Security Events or search for a user and drill down into the associated identity. They will be quickly able to understand the users’ individual security posture aligned with best practice.

What are the recent Security Risk Events for that user? Does that user;

  • Have MFA enabled? Is MFA enabled with an Authenticator App as the primary method?
  • Is the users Active Directory password in the Pwned Passwords v4 list from Have I Been Pwned?
  • Has the user recently being attempting Azure Password Reset functions?
  • What are the last 10 logins for that user?
  • What is the base user information for that user and what devices are registered to that user? Are they Azure AD Joined?

User Secure Score Summary.PNG

The clip below gives a walk through with more detail of my Microsoft USER tool.

How I built it

The solution is built using;

  • NodeJS and Javascript
  • leveraging Azure Functions to interface with Azure AD, Microsoft Graph, Azure Table Service
  • Lithnet Password Protection for Active Directory that in turn leverages the Have I Been Pwned v4 dataset
  • All secrets are stored in Azure Key Vault.
  • The WebApp is Application Insights enabled.
  • The WebApp is deployed using a Docker Container into Azure App Service

The architecture is shown below.

MS User Security Evaluation Reporter Architecture

The Code

A Repo with the code can be found here. Keep in mind I’m not a developer and this is my first WebApp that was put together late at night and over weekends and only tested in Chrome and Edge. The Readme also contains hopefully everything you should need to deploy it.

 

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Lithnet Password Protection for Active Directory

Lithnet Password Protection for Active Directory

Today Ryan Newington released the latest Open Source project from Lithnet; Lithnet Password Protection for Active Directory.

I’ve posted extensively about leveraging Lithnet services in conjunction with Microsoft Identity Manager. In fact many of the solutions I’ve built for customers just wouldn’t be as functional without Ryan’s extensive contributions to the Microsoft Identity Management community under the Lithnet brand.

What is Lithnet Password Protection for Active Directory

With the latest offering I had the opportunity to test a few elements of the solution before release. Mostly around the Pwned (Compromised) Password functions that leverage the Have I Been Pwned NTLM datasets (available here). This functionality provides the ability to;

  • add the Have I Been Pwned NTLM dataset to the Lithnet Password Protection Compromised Passwords Data Store that will prohibit those passwords from being used
  • allow administrators to test individual users Active Directory password against the Have I Been Pwned NTLM dataset to identify if the password has been compromised
  • allow administrators to test users from an entire Active Directory domain against the Have I Been Pwned NTLM dataset to identify if the password has been compromised
  • on password change against Active Directory, only permit passwords that don’t appear in the compromised or banned password lists in the Lithnet Password Protection for Active Directory data store

In addition the Lithnet Password Protection for Active Directory solution also allows more granular definition of your Active Directory Password Policy e.g Reward a password with longer length, with less complexity.

Whilst Microsoft does have something similar (for banned passwords), it is still in preview, and for a subset of the functionality you will need to be a Microsoft Azure AD Premium licensed customer. And you can’t ingest the Have I Been Pwned password dataset in as a Custom Banned Password List either. You’re hoping Microsoft has a good overlap with those datasets.

Conclusion

If you’re like the majority of organisations I’ve consulted for, you are currently hoping that your existing password policies (length, complexity, rotation period etc) along with implementing Multi-Factor Authentication will provide you with a balance between end-user usability and security posture.

What you ultimately require however is the peace of mind that your end-users passwords in your on-premise Active Directory and Azure Active Directory don’t contain passwords that will be consistently used in Password Spray and Password Brute Force attacks.

Until we get further down the path to Passwordless Authentication this is the best protection you can have today against two of the common password based attacks.

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Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager v2, k-Anonymity and Have I Been Pwned

Microsoft Identity Manager - Have I Been Pwned

Background

In August 2017 Troy Hunt released a sizeable list of Pwned Passwords. 320 Million in fact.

I subsequently wrote this post on Identifying Active Directory Users with Pwned Passwords using Microsoft/Forefront Identity Manager which called the API and sets a boolean attribute in the MIM Service that could be used with business logic to force users with accounts that have compromised passwords to change their password on next logon.

Whilst that was a proof of concept/discussion point of sorts AND  I had a disclaimer about sending passwords across the internet to a third-party service there was a lot of momentum around the HIBP API and I developed a solution and wrote this update to check the passwords locally.

Today Troy has released v2 of that list and updated the API with new features and functionality. If you’re playing catch-up I encourage you to read Troy’s post from August last year, and my two posts about checking Active Directory passwords against that list.

Leveraging V2 (with k-Anonymity) of the Have I Been Pwned API

With v2 of the HIBP passwod list and API the number of leaked credentials in the list has grown to half a billion. 501,636,842 Pwned Passwords to be exact.

With the v2 list in conjunction with Junade Ali from Cloudflare the API has been updated to be leveraged with a level of anonymity. Instead of sending a SHA-1 hash of the password to check if the password you’re checking is on the list you can now send a truncated version of the SHA-1 hash of the password and you will be returned a set of passwords from the HIBP v2 API. This is done using a concept called k-anonymity detailed brilliantly here by Junade Ali.

v2 of the API also returns a score for each password in the list. Basically how many times the password has previously been seen in leaked credentials lists. Brilliant.

Updated Pwned PowerShell Management Agent for Pwned Password Lookup

Below is an updated Password.ps1 script for the previous API version of my Pwned Password Management Agent for Microsoft Identity Manager. It functions by;

  • taking the new password received from PCNS
  • hashes the password to SHA-1 format
  • looks up the v2 HIBP API using part of the SHA-1 hash
  • updates the MIM Service with Pwned Password status

Checkout the original post with all the rest of the details here.

Summary

Of course you can also download (recommended via Torrent) the Pwned Password dataset. Keep in mind that the compressed dataset is 8.75 GB and uncompressed is 29.4 GB. Convert that into an On-Premise SQL Table(s) as I did in the linked post at the beginning of this post and you’ll be well in excess of that.

Awesome work from Troy and Junade.

 

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Diagnosing FIM/MIM ‘kerberos-no-logon-server’ error on an Active Directory Management Agent

Overview

I have a complex customer environment where Microsoft Identity Manager is managing identities across three Active Directory Forests. The Forests all serve different purposes and are contained in different network zones. Accordingly there are firewalls between the zone where the MIM Sync Server is located and two of the other AD Forests as shown in the graphic below.

As part of the project the maintainers of the network infrastructure had implemented rules to allow the MIM Sync server to connect to the other two AD Forests. I had successfully been able to create the Active Directory Management Agents for each of the Forests and perform synchronization imports.

The Error ‘kerberos-no-logon-server’

Everything was going well right up to the point I went to export changes to the two AD Forests that were separated by firewalls. I received the ‘kerberos-no-logon-server’ error as shown below from the run profile output.

I started investigating the error as I hadn’t encountered this one before. There were a few posts on the possibilities mainly dealing with properties of the AD MA’s configuration. But I did stumble on a mention of kerberos being used when provisioning users to Active Directory and setting the initial password. That aligned with what I was doing. I had provided the networking engineers with my firewall port requirements. Those are (no PCNS required for this implementation) ;

  • 389 TCP – LDAP
  • 636 TCP – LDAPS
  • 88 TCP – Kerberos
  • 464 TCP/UDP – Kerberos
  • 53 TCP – DNS
  • 3268 TCP/UDP – Global Catalog
  • 3269 TCP/UDP – Global Catalog
  • 135 TCP – RPC

My old school immediate thought was to Telnet to each of the ports to see if the firewall was allowing me through. But with a couple of forests to test against and UDP ports as well, it wasn’t going to be that easy. I found a nice little Test-Port function that did both TCP and UDP. I already had an older script for testing TCP ports via PowerShell. So I combined them.

Identifying the cause

As suspected connectivity to the forest where my MIM Sync Server was located was all good. The other two, not so much. GC connectivity wouldn’t give me the Kerberos error, but not having Kerberos Port 464 certainly would.

In the backwards and forwards with the networking team I had to test connectivity many times so I added a running output as well as a summary output. The running output highlighting ports that weren’t accessible.

Here’s the raw script if you’re in a similar situation. Get the Test-Port Function from the URL in line 1 to test UDP Port connectivity. Add additional ports to the arrays if required (eg. for PCNS), and update the forest names in lines 21-23.

Summary

I’m sure this is going to become more relevant in a Cloud/Hybrid world where MIM Servers will be in Azure, Active Directory Forests will be in different networks and separated by firewalls and Network Security Groups.

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Dynamic Active Directory User Provisioning placement (OU) using the Granfeldt Powershell Management Agent

When using Forefront / Microsoft Identity Manager for provisioning users into Active Directory, determining which organisational unit (OU) to place the user in varies from customer to customer. Some AD OU structures are flat, others hierarchical based on business, departmental, functional role or geography. Basically every implementation I’ve done has been different.

That said the most recent implementation I’ve done is for an organisation that is growing and as such the existing structure is in flux and based on differing logic depending on who you talk to. Coming soon they’re restructuring their OU structure but not before MIM will be live. Damn.

This blog post details my interim solution to enable provisioning of new users into AD with an existing complex OU structure until the customer simplifies their hierarchy with upcoming work and without having to maintain a matrix of mapping tables.

Overview

In this blog post I’ll document how you can perform dynamic Active Directory user provisioning placement utilising Søren Granfeldt’s extremely versatile PowerShell Management Agent.

Using the Synchronisation Rule for AD Outbound I land the new AD account into a landing OU. My Placement MA (using the PS MA), see’s accounts in this landing OU and then queries back into AD using the new users Title (title) and State (st) attributes to find other AD users with the same values, location (DN). It orders the results and moves our new AD account to the location of the greatest number of users with the same metadata.

My User Placement MA is used in conjunction with an Active Directory MA and Declarative Rules in the MIM Portal.

Getting Started with the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent

In case you haven’t read my other PS MA blog posts here is the background on getting started with the Granfeldt PS MA. If you have you can skip through this section.

First up, you can get it from here. Søren’s documentation is pretty good but does assume you have a working knowledge of FIM/MIM and this blog post is no different. Configuration tasks like adding additional attributes the User Object Class in the MIM Portal, updating MPR’s, flow rules, Workflows, Sets etc are assumed knowledge and if not is easily Bing’able for you to work it out.

Three items I had to work out that I’ll save you the pain of are;

  • You must have a Password.ps1 file. Even though we’re not doing password management on this MA, the PS MA requires a file for this field. The .ps1 doesn’t need to have any logic/script inside it. It just needs to be present
  • The credentials you give the MA to run the scripts as, needs to be in the format of just ‘accountname’ NOT ‘domain\accountname’. I’m using the service account that I’ve used for the Active Directory MA. The target system is the same directory service and the account has the permissions required (you’ll need to add the service account to the appropriate Lync role group for user management)
  • The path to the scripts in the PS MA Config must not contain spaces and be in old-skool 8.3 format. I’ve chosen to store my scripts in an appropriately named subdirectory under the MIM Extensions directory. Tip: from a command shell use “dir /x” to get the 8.3 directory format name. Mine looks like C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~4\2010\SYNCHR~1\EXTENS~2\Placement

Schema Script (schema.ps1)

As I’m using the OOTB (out of the box) Active Directory MA to provision the AD account and only using this MA to move the AD Object the schema only consists of the attributes needed to workout where the user should reside and update them.

Password Script (password.ps1)

Just a placeholder file as detailed above.

Import Script (import.ps1)

The import script looks to see if the user is currently residing in the LandingOU that the AD MA puts new users into. If the user is, then the Import Script gets the users ‘Title’ and ‘State’ attribute values and searches AD to find any other users with the same State and Title and pulls back their OU. The script discounts any users that are in the Expired OU structure and any users (including the user being processed) that are in the Landing OU. It orders the list by occurrence and then selects the first entry. This becomes the location where we will move the user to. We also update the targetOU custom attribute with where the user is, once moved to keep the synchronisation rule happy and no longer trigger a move on the user (unless someone moves the user back to the LandingOU). The location of the LandingOU and the Expired OU’s path are set near the top of the script. If we don’t find any matches then I have catchall per State (st) where we will put the user and they can then be moved manually if required later.

On the $request line you’ll see I have a filter for the User Object Class and users with an account name starting with ‘U’. For the customer I wrote this for, all users start with U. You can obviously also have Filters on the MA. I have a few there as well, but limiting the size of the returned array makes things quicker to run full imports.

Export Script (export.ps1)

The export script is basically doing the move of the users AD account.

Wiring it all together

In order to wire the functionality all together there are the usual number of configuration steps to be completed. Below I’ve shown a number of the key points associated with making it all work.

Basically create the PS MA, import attributes from the PS MA, add any additional attributes to the Portal Schema, update the Portal Filter to allow Administrators to use the attribute, update the Synchronisation MPR to allow the Sync Engine to flow in the new attributes, create the Set used for the transition, create your Synchronisation Rule, create your Terminal Services Workflow, create your Terminal Services MPR, create your MA Run Profiles and let it loose.

Management Agent Configuration

As per the tips above, the format for the script paths must be without spaces etc. I’m using 8.3 format and I’m using the same service account as my AD MA.

Password script must be specified but as we’re not doing password management it’s empty as detailed above.

If your schema.ps1 file is formatted correctly you can select your attributes.

My join rule is simple. AccountName (which as you’ll see in the Import.ps1 is aligned with sAMAccountName) to AccountName in the MetaVerse.

My import flow is just bringing back in the DN to a custom MV attribute.

Synchronisation Rules

My Placement MA Outbound Sync rule relies on the value of the new OU that was bought in on the Import script.

We flow out the new DN for the user object.

Set

I created a Set that I use as a transition to trigger the move of the user object on my Placement MA. My Set looks to see if the user account is in AD and active (I have a Boolean attribute not shown and another rule in the MIM Portal that is set based on an advanced flow rule in the Sync engine that has some logic to determine if employment date as sourced from my HR Management Agent is current and the user should be active) and that the user is currently in the LandingOU.

Workflow

An action based workflow that will use the trigger the Synchronisation rule on the Placement MA.

MPR

Finally my MPR for moving the AD object is based on the transition set,

and my Placement Workflow.

Summary

Using the Granfeldt PowerShell MA it was very easy to accomplish something that would have been a nightmare to try and do with declarative rules or un-maintainable using a matrix of mapping tables. It would also be possible to use this as a basis to move users when their State or Title changes. This example could also be reworked easily to use different attributes.

Follow Darren on Twitter @darrenjrobinson

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Managing AD Terminal Services Configuration with FIM / MIM using the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent

Forefront / Microsoft Identity Manager contains numerous Management Agents (MA’s) out of the box. However an MA for managing AD Terminal Services user configuration isn’t one of them. And at first pass you’d think you could just manipulate a few attributes in AD on an AD MA like you do for home directories (aside from creating the file and permissions on the filesystem) and you’d be done. Don’t worry, I made that wrong assumption too.

Overview

In this blog post I’ll document how you can enable Active Directory users with the necessary attributes and file system elements utilising Søren Granfeldt’s extremely versatile PowerShell Management Agent. I’ll show you how to do the minimum of provisioning a terminal services home directory, a terminal services profile directory, update the associated users AD account with those paths and the terminal services drive letter whilst also allowing the user to logon. Understanding how this is done you can then easily then extend the functionality for lifecycle management (e.g. change location of terminal services directories, delete for de-provisioning). For the file system directories and permissions I’ve re-used logic from my AD home director PS MA detailed here which is based on Kent Nordström’s home directory MA stripped back with a few other subtle changes.

My Terminal Services MA is used in conjunction with an Active Directory MA and Declarative Rules in the MIM Portal.

A note on managing Terminal Services Configuration

Terminal Services configuration properties are, historically, held in a single attribute ‘userParameters’ (a BLOB, a Binary Large OBject). Inside the userParameters BLOB are the four attributes we’re interested in;

  • allowLogon
  • terminalServicesHomeDirectory
  • terminalServicesProfilePath
  • terminalServicesHomeDrive

What you see via LDAP in the userParameters attribute is either an empty attribute (no terminal services configuration) or an attribute full of encoded characters. We’ll use this as our trigger for the MIM rules to determine who has an existing configuration and who doesn’t.

Getting Started with the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent

In case you haven’t read my other PS MA blog posts here is the background on getting started with the Granfeldt PS MA. If you have you can skip through this section.

First up, you can get it from here. Søren’s documentation is pretty good but does assume you have a working knowledge of FIM/MIM and this blog post is no different. Configuration tasks like adding additional attributes the User Object Class in the MIM Portal, updating MPR’s, flow rules, Workflows, Sets etc are assumed knowledge and if not is easily Bing’able for you to work it out.

Three items I had to work out that I’ll save you the pain of are;

  • You must have a Password.ps1 file. Even though we’re not doing password management on this MA, the PS MA requires a file for this field. The .ps1 doesn’t need to have any logic/script inside it. It just needs to be present
  • The credentials you give the MA to run the scripts as, needs to be in the format of just ‘accountname’ NOT ‘domain\accountname’. I’m using the service account that I’ve used for the Active Directory MA. The target system is the same directory service and the account has the permissions required (you’ll need to add the service account to the appropriate Lync role group for user management)
  • The path to the scripts in the PS MA Config must not contain spaces and be in old-skool 8.3 format. I’ve chosen to store my scripts in an appropriately named subdirectory under the MIM Extensions directory. Tip: from a command shell use “dir /x” to get the 8.3 directory format name. Mine looks like C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~4\2010\SYNCHR~1\EXTENS~2\TermServ

Schema Script (schema.ps1)

As I’m using the OOTB (out of the box) Active Directory MA to provision the AD account and only showing provisioning of terminal services configuration the schema only consists of the attributes needed to create the terminal services directories, the terminal services drive letter and update the user object in AD.

Password Script (password.ps1)

Just a placeholder file as detailed above.

Import Script (import.ps1)

The import script looks to see if there is a terminal services config for the user (in the userParameters BLOB) and then uses the ADSI provider that allows us to access the terminal services configuration attributes to read and flow through the four attributes we’re interested in.

On the $request line you’ll see I have a filter for the User Object Class and users with an account name starting with ‘U’. For the customer I wrote this for, all users start with U. You can obviously also have Filters on the MA. I have a few there as well, limiting the size of the returned array makes things quicker to run full imports.

Export Script (export.ps1)

The export script is doing a couple of functions. It is creating the terminal services home and profile directories, setting the necessary permissions on the home directory for the user and then updating the AD object with the terminal services home and profile directory paths, the terminal services directory drive letter and allowing the user to logon.

Wiring it all together

In order to wire the functionality all together there are the usual number of configuration steps to be completed. Below I’ve shown a number of the key points associated with making it all work.

Basically create the PS MA, import attributes from the PS MA, add any additional attributes to the Portal Schema, update the Portal Filter to allow Administrators to use the attribute, update the Synchronisation MPR to allow the Sync Engine to flow in the new attributes, create the Set used for the transition, create your Synchronisation Rule, create your Terminal Services Workflow, create your Terminal Services MPR, create your MA Run Profiles and let it loose.

Management Agent Configuration

As per the tips above, the format for the script paths must be without spaces etc. I’m using 8.3 format and I’m using the same service account as my AD MA.

Password script must be specified but as we’re not doing password management it’s empty as detailed above.

If your schema.ps1 file is formatted correctly you can select your attributes.

My join rule is simple. AccountName (which as you’ll see in the Import.ps1 is aligned with sAMAccountName) to AccountName in the MetaVerse.

My import flow is just bringing back in the DN to a custom MV attribute.

Synchronisation Rules

My Terminal Services Outbound Sync rule doesn’t need to be very complex. All it is doing is sync’ing out the Terminal Services Profile and Directory paths, Terminal Services Drive Letter and Allow Logon attributes.

Set

I created a Set that I use as a transition to trigger provisioning to the Terminal Services MA. My Set looks to see if the user account is in AD and active (I have a Boolean attribute not shown and another rule in the MIM Portal that is set based on an advanced flow rule in the Sync engine that has some logic to determine if employment date as sourced from my HR Management Agent is current and the user should be active) and that the Terminal Services Config is not already set (this is also based on a Boolean attribute I set via an Advanced Flow rule on my AD MA based on whether there is a value in the userParameters attribute). See my Exchange mailbox provisioning post using the PS MA for an example of setting a boolean attribute based on attribute being present or not.

Workflow

An action based workflow that is used to trigger the Synchronisation rule on the Terminal Services MA.

MPR

Finally my MPR for provisioning Terminal Services config is based on the transition set,

and my Terminal Services Workflow.

Summary

Using the Granfeldt PowerShell MA it was very easy to provision a terminal services configuration to new users and permission the directories correctly. It is also easy to extend the solution to manage moving terminal services directories to different locations, deletion etc.

 

Follow Darren on Twitter @darrenjrobinson

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Provisioning Home Directories for Active Directory Users with FIM / MIM using the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent

Forefront / Microsoft Identity Manager contains numerous Management Agents (MA’s) out of the box. However an MA for creating user home directories and setting the associated permissions isn’t one of them.

Over the years I’ve accomplished home directory provisioning and permissioning in Active Directory / Windows File Services and Novell eDirectory / Novell File Services using methods that aren’t strictly best practice / supported (e.g. calling native libraries from within a Management Agent Extension to create/manage/delete etc). Whilst this functionally works the ability for end customers to maintain the implementation for changes is limited.

Overview

In this blog post I’ll document how you can enable an Active Directory users with a home directory with the required permissions and update their associated AD object with the home directory path and drive letter utilising Søren Granfeldt’s extremely versatile PowerShell Management Agent. I’ll show you how to do the minimum of provisioning a home directory to a user. Understanding how this is done you can then easily then extend the functionality for lifecycle management (e.g. change location of home directory, add sub-directories, delete for de-provisioning). I didn’t start from scratch on this one as Kent Nordström had most of what I needed as detailed here. I stripped it back to do what I wanted with a few other subtle changes.

My Home Directory MA is used in conjunction with an Active Directory MA and Declarative Rules in the MIM Portal.

Getting Started with the Granfeldt PowerShell Management Agent

First up, you can get it from here. Søren’s documentation is pretty good but does assume you have a working knowledge of FIM/MIM and this blog post is no different. Configuration tasks like adding additional attributes the User Object Class in the MIM Portal, updating MPR’s, flow rules, Workflows, Sets etc are assumed knowledge and if not is easily Bing’able for you to work it out.

Three items I had to work out that I’ll save you the pain of are;

  • You must have a Password.ps1 file. Even though we’re not doing password management on this MA, the PS MA requires a file for this field. The .ps1 doesn’t need to have any logic/script inside it. It just needs to be present
  • The credentials you give the MA to run the scripts as, needs to be in the format of just ‘accountname’ NOT ‘domain\accountname’. I’m using the service account that I’ve used for the Active Directory MA. The target system is the same directory service and the account has the permissions required (you’ll need to add the service account to the appropriate Lync role group for user management)
  • The path to the scripts in the PS MA Config must not contain spaces and be in old-skool 8.3 format. I’ve chosen to store my scripts in an appropriately named subdirectory under the MIM Extensions directory. Tip: from a command shell use “dir /x” to get the 8.3 directory format name. Mine looks like C:\PROGRA~1\MICROS~4\2010\SYNCHR~1\EXTENS~2\HomeDir

Schema Script (schema.ps1)

As I’m using the OOTB (out of the box) Active Directory MA to provision the AD account and only showing provisioning of home directories. As such the schema only consists of the attributes needed to create the home directory and update the user object in AD.

Password Script (password.ps1)

Just a placeholder file as detailed above.

Import Script (import.ps1)

Nothing to complex. Bringing back in the two attributes that we export to allow the confirming import to complete.
On the $request line you’ll see I have a filter for the User Object Class and users with an account name starting with ‘U’. For the customer I wrote this for, all users start with U. You can obviously also have Filters on the MA. I have a few there as well, but limiting the size of the returned array makes things quicker to run full imports.

Export Script (export.ps1)

The export script is doing a couple of functions. It is creating the home directory, setting the necessary permissions on the home directory for the user and then updating the AD object with the home directory path and the home directory drive letter.

Wiring it all together

In order to wire the functionality all together there are the usual number of configuration steps to be completed. Below I’ve shown a number of the key points associated with making it all work.

Basically create the PS MA, import attributes from the PS MA, add any additional attributes to the Portal Schema, update the Portal Filter to allow Administrators to use the attribute, update the Synchronisation MPR to allow the Sync Engine to flow in the new attributes, create the Set used for the transition, create your Synchronisation Rule, create your Home Director Workflow, create your Home Directory MPR, create your MA Run Profiles and let it loose.

Management Agent Configuration

As per the tips above, the format for the script paths must be without spaces etc. I’m using 8.3 format and I’m using the same service account as my AD MA.

Password script must be specified but as we’re not doing password management its empty as detailed above.

If your schema.ps1 file is formatted correctly you can select your attributes.

My join rule is simple. AccountName (which as you’ll see in the Import.ps1 is aligned with sAMAccountName) to AccountName in the MetaVerse.

My import flow is just bringing back in the DN to a custom MV attribute.

Synchronisation Rules

My Home Directory Outbound Sync rule doesn’t need to be very complex. All it is doing is sync’ing out the Home Directory Drive Letter and Home Directory Path attributes.

Set

I created a Set that I use as a transition to trigger provisioning to the Home Directory. My Set looks to see if the user account is in AD and active (I have a Boolean attribute not shown and another rule in the MIM Portal that is set based on an advanced flow rule in the Sync engine that has some logic to determine if employment date as sourced from my HR Management Agent is current and the user should be active) and that the Home Folder Path is not already set.

Workflow

An action based workflow that will use the trigger the Synchronisation rule on the Home Directory MA.

MPR

Finally my MPR for provisioning Home Directories is based on the transition set,

and my Home Directory Workflow.

Summary

Using the Granfeldt PowerShell MA it was very easy to provision home directories to new users and permission them correctly. It is also easy to extend the solution to manage moving home directories to different locations, deletion etc.

Follow Darren on Twitter @darrenjrobinson