Pat Spencer

Found this great article. http://blog.scosby.com/post/2012/12/13/Disabling-Windows-Server-2012-Lock-Screen-Timeout.aspx Disabling the Windows Server 2012 Lock Screen Timeout In Server 2012 by default, the lock screen will put the monitors to sleep after 1 minute. I found myself waking the monitors too frequently. An initial web search led me to a MSDN forum post for Windows 8 that unlocked a missing Power Settings feature in Server 2012.   1.        Open the following registry key      a.        HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\7516b95f-f776-4464-8c53-06167f40cc99\8EC4B3A5-6868-48c2-BE75-4F3044BE88A7     2.        Set the following value      a.        Attributes => 2   3.        Now open Control Panel>Power Options>Change Plan Settings>Change Advanced Power Settings      a.        The new Display section “Console lock display off timeout” is now available.      b.       Configure your “Plugged in” value accordingly (0 to disable)

This is a quick and dirty but works. Here is a simple script to export and then import the OU structure from one AD to another, such as when you want to create a lab from a production AD. To export the Prod OU's to a CSV, enter the following command:  Get-ADOrganizationalUnit -Filter *|select name,@{n="Path";E={($_.DistinguishedName).replace("OU="+$_.name+",","") }} | ConvertTo-Csv -NoTypeInformation |out-file -FilePath Prod-OUS-4-Import.csv Next,  edit the domain name in the CSV to change it to the new domain. Also, clean up the file to remove any OU's that are out of scope.  Third, run the following script using the CSV to import the names and Path of the OU's # Command Line Parameters Param(  [Parameter(Mandatory=$false,HelpMessage='CSV FIle')][string]$Inputfile=".\Prod-OUS-4-Import.csv" ) import-module activedirectory # Read in data $OUS = import-csv $InputFile $ous |ft -a  #validate data on screen # get current

I was recently asked to evaluate an Active Directory environment to determine it's health, specifically relating to GPO's and how they were being used. I discovered that the number and configuration of the OU's, GPO's, and contents, were a clear indication that the administration of GPO's was not well understood by the committee of people who were managing them, and that there were clearly problems being self-inflicted due to these issues. The question, however, was how can we quickly assess whether the management of GPO's was in trouble, and also how can we quantify the issue? The first thing to understand is that there are Recommended Best Practices from Microsoft for how to manage GPO's.  See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785903(v=ws.10).aspx But how to quantify these subjective suggestions? First,  "Minimize the Use of the Block Policy Inheritance Feature".   You can determine the number of OU's that have Blocked Policy Inhe