ADHC is born (SCREENSHOTS included)
So I have started the Active Directory Health Check (ADHC) and I must admit, I am loving it. I took an old application I was building and fixed some bugs that I knew existed. Then I slapped a quick GUI onto it, just so we can see some information on the screen.
Information gathering is the first step of the application, once we have the information we can then start analyzing the data and running some rules against the data that we have.
One of the bug bears I have with the wonderful Active Directory namespace is that there is no way of it reporting statuses back to the calling object. This is more a gripe when it comes to a GUI.
Why?-
Well say you have a massive forest with many domains and many sites across slow links, the Forest object tries to discover and populate this information. It does not report its progress so you are stuck with an unresponsive GUI. When it does come back you have all the information you need though. I will find a way of entertaining the user while we get the information. But that’s the least of my worries at the momement.
So lets dive straight into the first screen shots of the tool. The first screen shot shows you information of the FOREST that was discovered, as you can see it shows you the following Forest information
· Forest functional level
· Number of domains in the Forest
· Number of sites in the Forest
· List of sites in Forest
· List of Global Catalogs (GC’s) in the Forest
· Forest wide FSMO Roles and which Domain controller holds these
The screen shot below Describes the information above:
Then we get to the domain information, as you can see it shows you the following domain information:
- Domain Name
- Domain Parent (this would show the tree structure if this was a child domain)
- Domain Functional Level
- The site(s) this domain spans
- GC’s in the domain
- Domain Wide FSMO roles and which DC’s host these roles (you can see I have broken best practice in this instance with all FSMO’s on one DC but this is a lab test environment)
Now that we have the domain information lets have a look at the domain controllers (DCs) in the domain. As you can see it shows you the following:
- DC FQDN
- DC operating system (OS)
- DC IP address
- DC site name
- If the DC is a GC or not
- Current Time on DC (Important for trouble shooting Kerberos ticket issues)
- FSMO Roles on the DC
- Partitions hosted by that DC
Now this is the “General Domain Controller” information, then there is specific information about a DC namely the replication information about this DC. I have exposed the following information as Tabs in this GUI:
- Inbound and Outbound connection for the DC
- Replication Errors for the DC
- Replication Partners for the DC
- DC Meta data, so you can specify an objects distinguished name and it will return the meta data for that object.
Inbound and Outbound connection for the DC
Replication Errors for the DC
Replication Partners for the DC
DC Meta data, so you can specify an objects distinguished name and it will return the meta data for that object.
Anyway I thought I would let you all know what I am up to and how far I have gotten, as I have more tangible information I will release it. For now I am interested in your comments so please post away.
I have attached a ZIP file with all the pictures above if you would like them for your referance.
Carlos