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I'm trying to identify potential permission issues on areas of our AD tree. What I have in mind is something like SysInternals FileMon to monitor object access in Active Directory in real time.

For example: Adding a computer to the domain.

Is there anything like that in the wild? Is there a better way?

5 Answers 5

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If you're talking about a service trying to read...what object? I guess I'm missing what the AD has to do with the object in question. The best tools I've found for reading object access is filemon and regmon, and procmon, all from sysinternals. That normally gives a good overview of what's working and what's not for permission access.

We do have instances of AD policies not being read by systems periodically, and the only thing that seems to work is to: A) reboot. It might read it next time. B) force a refresh of the policy. It seems to be random as to when/how it takes, though, and Windows is simply FANTASTIC at giving feedback on what's happening. Ha ha! C) work around it. For example, assigning printers to certain computers wouldn't work sometimes and would other times, so eventually we just started slapping the freeware AdPrintx on to each workstation we deploy with a batch file in the startup folder that adds default printers while bypassing the random frustration of AD.

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  • Even something as simple as adding a computer to the domain. We're playing with Windows Deployment but the deployment tool would fail due to a permissions issues on an OU. These failures to read the OU were not visable in the AD Server's event log. However now thinking my downfall may have been only checking one of the AD servers eventlogs...
    – Skit
    Aug 27, 2009 at 3:33
  • Maybe. Would have to also check on the client to see if the logs there show anything, or if the deployment tool shows anything in an actual text file tracing the installation. Tracing AD interactions would get hairy because AD is spread out over other servers, so you'd have to find which server is handling the authentication/handing out policy/etc. for that particular system's interactions as far as I know. AD isn't meant to be centralized. You could look into a tool that will centralize logging and se eif that can help too, I suppose. Aug 27, 2009 at 13:01
  • Central logging is something on my wish list. The problem stemmed from Window Deployment Services, the logs on the machine being built is very confusing and didn't really indicate the problem.
    – Skit
    Aug 28, 2009 at 1:01
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I'm guessing you thought of using the event log, which should report permissions issues when trying to edit AD objects.

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  • The problem we have is a service trying to read objects, which don't appear to be logged in the event log... Unless I missed it.
    – Skit
    Aug 20, 2009 at 7:38
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have you tried Dumpsec. I have seen it used by auditors to get a good overview of the permissions and security settings in an AD.

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may be better way would be to take an account and check what kind of permission it has on OUs.

you can use dsrevoke.exe with /report option to get that detail for individual.

Or you can use "effective permissions" as explained here

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Did you try LIZA yet? It is a free tool for Active Directory Permission Analysis:

http://www.ldapexplorer.com/en/liza.htm

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