I have released AdFind V01.55.00 and AdMod V01.22.00. 🙂
AdFind
There are quite a few fixes and additions since the pre-Pandemic release. You can find a breakdown at http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/adfind/
AdMod
Surprise, it only took nine years to have a version of this I was comfortable enough to publicly release. Unlike AdFind, AdMod is exceptionally dangerous. If something is wrong it can really cause a lot of pain. So I am much slower to release updates.
The most exciting changes in AdMod in my mind are around the security descriptor functionality. In my opinion it is easier and WAAAAY faster than DSACLS and where DSACLS can only do a single object at a time AdMod will pop the security descriptors on multiple… Though… I will admit that DSACLS has better “you screwed up” assistance. I didn’t add code to catch every single bad/wrong thing that could be done which could result in it looking like it updated something but doesn’t or bail out with an error. It still uses the MSFT SDDL string to Security Descriptor functionality which has its own (sometimes apparently random) rules. I thought about writing the code to build my own binary security Descriptors but decided against it.
When using the Security Descriptor functionality always add –exterr to get the better error messages, and possibly you will need to use –log and look at the admod.log file to see what it thought it was doing. Always test in lab environments to make sure you understand what it will do. Check out the Security Descriptor Shortcuts as they do some of the most common things people need in an easy manner and are less likely to be messed up.
You can find a breakdown on most of the changes/additions at http://www.joeware.net/freetools/tools/admod/
NOTE: You may notice that there are version jumps from whatever versions you may have. Yes, especially for AdMod I have versions that are not publicly released. It isn’t you, it’s me. 🙂
NOTE 2: As of right now I am thinking these will be the last public releases of these tools unless I find some bad bugs or some cool functionality I absolutely want to put in and share. Microsoft’s investment in Active Directory has gotten worse and worse over the last 5 or so years and I don’t see it turning around unless someone there quickly figures out that that all Cloud all the time isn’t the future and I don’t see that happening; it is way better money for them right now to have people paying for Azure. So if they aren’t going to be investing in it and improving it etc there really isn’t a lot to with AdFind and AdMod now other than maybe focusing some energy on making them better for OpenLDAP which, you never know, may happy. Or it could be a whole new pair of tools written from scratch for OpenLDAP. The only think I have really thought about doing is to see how much work it will be to get them to compile successfully and run as x64 binaries. If that works out to not be too much work I will release those binaries.
If this is the end of the updates for these tools I would like to say it has been a pleasure working on them and making them better for folks and I love all of the emails over the years telling me how much time has been saved with them and how much has been accomplished that folks wouldn’t otherwise accomplish. I really loved hearing how people could dump “professional” tools that they had to pay for and use that money for other things.
I have a ton of other ideas I am planning on working on. Which ones I am really going to work on next? I am not sure yet.
joe
