September 2014

Considerations When an IT Employee Leaves

Recently I’ve helped clients and even off-boarded IT employees from our own team. There are quite a few considerations you must make when someone in IT leaves a company or even just moves to another team within the same company. This article is going to focus heavily on the employee leaving the company; but you will run into some of the same obstacles with them moving to a new area in the company. The “normal” HR off-boarding or cross-boarding doesn’t usually cover the amount of access that these employees have, and the IT staff themselves must make many additional considerations to make things as smooth as possible.

At a high level you have to consider the following:

  • How many accounts do they have?
  • Are these accounts tied to any applications?
  • Which devices use a shared password they know?
  • What access rosters are they on?
  • What knowledge will be lost when they leave?
  • Who is going to take over ownership of their current tasks?

Let’s dive into these questions in more depth and explore some possible solutions to them.

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Building a Desired State Configuration (DSC) Lab

Recently I presenting at the Indianapolis PowerShell User Group and talked about Desired State Configuration. The presentation was 100% demonstrations, and I decided it would be a good idea to provide all of the PowerShell commands/instructions I used to build my lab environment for the presentation.

Note: Please note that these instructions were written using multiple Experimental DSC Resources, Microsoft and I myself provide no guarantee that these will work in a production environment. I strongly encourage that you use test environments that do not matter until you feel comfortable with DSC.

Pre-requisites

  • Licensed/Trial Media for Windows Server 2012 R2
  • An installed/updated Sys prepped VM Parent Disk
    • Stored at D:\Templates\Server2012R2.vhdx
  • a Virtual Switch within Hyper-V Configured as a Private, named “Private Network”
  • At least 7GB of free memory
    • You can adjust this all the way down to just 4GB
  • Downloaded copy of the latest DSC Resource Kit – Download Here

Now before we dive into the scripting component of this blog post I want you to know that this is not 100% automated. You will have some manual steps here and there, it is possible to 100% automate – but that will require significantly more effort. Please continue reading for instructions on this demonstration.

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PowerShell: Check for user accounts running Windows Services

Recently I worked with a client to validate that if a user account were to be disabled that it wasn’t going to break any of their currently running applications. You can be bitten by an accidental miss-configuration where an end-users account is running a Windows Service or possibly at a lower level in a specific application such as SQL Server jobs. Luckily with the Power of PowerShell, we can conquer the Windows Services! It is also possible to create a SQL Query or even PowerShell scripts to query SQL, but we are not covering that in this article.

Checking Windows Services:

The biggest concern I had was the Windows Services. It is easy enough for a junior admin to install SQL and specify their account as the Service Account, THIS IS BAD! However, with some pure PowerShell, we can perform a visual inspection, or with some minor adjustments, we could look for a service running with a specific user.

Get-CimInstance -ComputerName (Get-ADComputer -Filter 'OperatingSystem -like "Windows Server*"' | Select -ExpandProperty Name) -Query "SELECT Name, StartName FROM Win32_Service WHERE StartName <> 'LocalSystem'" | ? { $_.StartName -notlike 'NT AUTHORITY*' -and $_.StartName -notlike 'NT SERVICE*' } | Select Name, StartName, PSComputerName

In the above example, we are using a parenthetical command along with the Get-CimInstance Cmdlet. The command that executes first is the Get-ADComputer. This command requires the ActiveDirectory module is available on your computer system. It uses the filter parameter to look for any computer that is running Windows Server (any version).

Then it passes those values to the Get-CimInstance, which performs an initial WQL Query, which doesn’t allow and statements. Therefore, we have to pipe it’s returned values to a where statement which continues filtering for us. The end of the command provides the service name, the user account running it, and the computer this service is on.

I was able to run this against the client’s environment, and within a few minutes, we knew it was safe to disable the account.

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