Troubleshooting With Near Zero Access

Early one morning last week I attempted to RDP into my lab to test something out I was looking into at work. Access to my terminal server was fine, but from there, I was unable to access any other system on my network. Every system that I attempted to RDP into came back stating that my user account was unauthorized for RDP access on that system. The user is a Domain Admin so there should be no reason...

Installing NDES on the Issuing CA

The Network Device Enrollment Service (better known as NDES) is a component of Active Directory Certificate Services.  It's based on the industry standard Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol (SCEP) which is an Internet Draft by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  SCEP is designed...

Building the Issuing CA

In the last post, we went through building the root CA which followed building the domain and generating a mess of test users.  Moving along this time, we're going to start building the issuing CA for the domain and for our network devices.  Once we get through this stage, the root...

Building the Root CA

In the lab, a single Windows Server running Active Directory and Active Directory Certificate Services.  But if you haven't figured out yet, I am a big fan of overkill and never do anything only to the level of minimum required.  I always like to do everything bigger and better, as there will...

Generating Test Users

In setting up an Active Directory environment, you often need test users that are part of test groups and test Organizational Units. In a post at TechExams, Slowhand presents a script that will take a csv file containing names and departments of some dummy users, then creates an OU structure based on a couple of questions.  The users will be created based on the names in the file,...

Building the Domain

Edit: This post has been updated with a new walkthrough as I changed my mind on a few things.   Most notably, I'll be working with a new isolated domain rather than a child domain off of my production domain. In this post, I'll go through the steps of building an Active Directory domain.  I'll...