Adventures in identity management
Good monitoring and alerting is an essential, but often under-loved, part of any computing infrastructure. The complexities and multiple dependencies of even a straight-forward MIIS installation make systematic monitoring absolutely essential. Server Health Obviously you will be monitoring that the server itself is actually up. I believe something a little more than a ping is…
Once you get the hang of Extensible MAs a whole world of possibilities opens up. If you’re trying to achieve something that is related to Identity in some way, and it’s scriptable, then you can do it with an XMA. One such example I came across, in a university environment, was personal websites. Certain users…
Some tasks seem like they should be difficult to implement, but are in fact beautifully simple; while others tangle you up in complications for no apparently good reason. In my MIIS experience I’ve had far more trouble than seems right with Description fields. What I’m talking about here are the types of free-text comment fields…
This method has now been updated for Exchange 2007. Yesterday I posted about archiving home directories by zipping them with an extensible MA, and today I’m going to write about doing something similar with Exchange mailboxes. Exchange mailboxes are most usefully archived to PST files, and the only way I found to automate it was…
One of the things I love about MIIS is that it can be put to work on any object type you care to name, as long as you can cobble together some sort of automation process. One such example is a home directory. While needed by the user, it is not part of the user…
The most time critical aspect of an MIIS installation is likely to be the Password Sync. There are always going to be delays in syncs through the MAs, and people should be used to that – but when a user changes their password they are going to expect it to go straight through. If you…
During the installation of MIIS you are shown a list of groups (MIIS_Admins, MIIS_Joiners etc) which will be created. The groups are local groups, and I expect that most people, on their first installation, just accept that. But wouldn’t it be nice if, at that point, a little more explanation, or perhaps some alternative options…
Here’s a really, really useful trick. You can copy the MicrosoftIdentityIntegrationServer database to another server, run miisactivate, and, within no time at all, have an exact replica of your live server. Let me just spell this out – not only will you have all your MAs, your Metaverse fully populated, and your Connector Spaces fully populated;…
A frustrating deficiency of the Identity Manager application is the inability to copy the list of disconnectors from the Joiner page. I really don’t understand why this functionality wasn’t included – was it just an oversight? Ploughing through the disconnectors is an inevitable part of taking over an existing directory, and to do that you’re…
Follwing on from yesterday’s post, where I wrote about hanging on to your import and export logs, I now present a way to view them using an xml stylesheet. The first problem with this approach is that the xml files produced by MIIS don’t work with a stylesheet. The stylesheet name must be included in…