Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Sander Berkouwer
Book Image

Active Directory Administration Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Sander Berkouwer

Overview of this book

Updated to the Windows Server 2022, this second edition covers effective recipes for Active Directory administration that will help you leverage AD's capabilities for automating network, security, and access management tasks in the Windows infrastructure. Starting with a detailed focus on forests, domains, trusts, schemas, and partitions, this book will help you manage domain controllers, organizational units, and default containers. You'll then explore Active Directory sites management as well as identify and solve replication problems. As you progress, you'll work through recipes that show you how to manage your AD domains as well as user and group objects and computer accounts, expiring group memberships, and Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) with PowerShell. Once you've covered DNS and certificates, you'll work with Group Policy and then focus on federation and security before advancing to Azure Active Directory and how to integrate on-premise Active Directory with Azure AD. Finally, you'll discover how Microsoft Azure AD Connect synchronization works and how to harden Azure AD. By the end of this AD book, you’ll be able to make the most of Active Directory and Azure AD Connect.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Unlocking a user

In many organizations with account lock-out policies enabled, the number of passwords that can be mistyped is set to a high value (such as 50), and then the lock-out period is set to indefinitely. This way, a locked-out account hinders the productivity of colleagues since they can't sign in until the account is unlocked. Manual unlocks need to be performed to enable affected colleagues to sign in again.

Getting ready

To modify user objects, sign in to a domain controller or a member server and/or device with RSAT for Active Directory Domain Services installed.

Sign in with an account that is a member of the Domain Admins group, the Account Operators group, or with an account that is delegated to manage user objects in the domain or scope of the OU where the user object resides.

How to do it...

This recipe shows two ways to unlock a user object:

  1. Using the Active Directory Administrative Center
  2. Using Windows PowerShell

Using the...