ldap

ActiveDirectory/LDAP result limits – MaxPageSize

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ActiveDirectory, respective LDAP, has a result limit setting, MaxPageSize. Those are set by default to 1000 rows per query.

This is primarily important if you use some kind of programming language to get results from LDAP, this code must compensate those limits and engage paging.

Your LDAP query does not need to provide the limit, only the code needs to do the paging as you always just get the max. amount of results set in the current settings.

In order to check your settings do the following commands in a command prompt / cmd window:

In theory you could set different values now as well, assuming you have the permission level to do so. But this is not recommended and you should engage paging instead, as you otherwise risk to overload your DCs – even if your commands won’t cause it, a possibly DoS attack could happen – malicious or not, so leave the limits, but be aware of them.

 

Active Directory password reset events and group change events

Active Directory password reset events and group change events

The script below uses the security event log on defined DCs within your Active Directory to export events related to certain activities. Eventually the script will export this even to an email and send it to you as a report – if needed.

As is – the script will specifically look for those events

  • 4724 – a user password was reset by an administrator respective via Active Directory Users and Groups MMC (or similar)
  • 4728 – a user was added to a security group
  • 4729 – a user was removed from a security group

There are more events – specifically events related to adding/removing users from distribution groups etc. – for the purpose of for what I wrote the script, I did not need this. Still, I thought it is worth publishing this, as others might find it helpful.

To add more events – just adjust line 19 – eventually just add more “or EventID=1234” statements – should be rather easy… in theory you could build that out as a parameter as well and inject it via the script.

 

Monitor user accounts in Active Directory with PRTG

Monitor user accounts in Active Directory with PRTG

The following script will read through your current Active Directory and filter for user accounts with the following specific conditions:

  • Lockedout users – please read below for further information about this
    • all users that are lockedout
    • must be an enabled user
    • that is not expired
  • disabled users
    • all users that have been disabled
  • expired users
    • must be an enabled user
    • the expiration date is set and past the current date
  • users with password never expires set
    • must be an enabled user

This will give you a pure counter output per channel in an for PRTG Extended script sensor XML result.

But there is a theoretical flaw in one of the methods – the locked out users. Now, user accounts get locked out in Active Directory due to too many logon attempts with an invalid password. This causes Active Directory to set the lockedout bit in the object properties. The issue here is that this bit will not be set back to 0 after the defined lockout duration (GPO) is past, the property will only be set back to 0 once the lockout duration is passed and he successfully logged on.

This means, the counter might give you more results then currently true, it might count users that have been locked out but the lockout-duration passed – but they did not yet logon successfully. This is somehow a false positive, while not totally false. In any case, you need to be aware of this.

The script could be more efficient as well in the way it filters a few things, so far I optimized it as far as I could – the LockedOut value can not be set as a -Filter, in theory it might be possible to speed it up with a -Filter to the UserAccountControl (if that is even possible – not tested) – but I am not certain this would work. If you really want to speed it up you would need to work with -LDAPFilter – but this actually needs to completely replace the internal filter capabilities of Get-ADUser – you can’t use both – it is one or the other.

This script updated with a corrected version as of February 2019 and was also posted in the PRTG knowledge base here.