VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy

Already in a previous document of the version 4.1 we saw as a novelty that we could include our ESXi hosts in an Active Directory to authenticate directly with centralized accounts; one of the new features of vSphere 5 is the possibility of deploying an intermediate proxy between the hosts and our domain. All this to help in the deployment with Auto Deploy not to put users with passwords in configuration files, we will also be able to use it with hosts not deployed with Auto Deploy!

Importing/Exporting Local Policies from/to GPO Directives with 'LocalGPO'

The other day we installed Microsoft Security Compliance Manager, today we see that within its installation we have a command-line utility called LocalGPO. It will allow us to export the local policies of a computer to a GPO policy backup to later use them in the Active Directory or import from a GPO backup (Active Directory) to the home team, Useful for computers that can't belong to a domain, teams in DMZ…

Migrating GPO's between different domains

If we need to carry policies from one Active Directory to another and we don't have a trust relationship, or there is no possible communication between them, we could make a backup of the GPO's that we are interested in in the source domain and import them through the migration tables in the destination domain. This document is valid for migrating GPO's between any version of Windows Server, since 2000, 2003, 2003 R2, 2008 or 2008 R2; In this document we will see how to perform these steps.

Associating the DNIe with Active Directory users and authenticating with SmartCard

In this document we will see how we can associate the digital certificates of the DNIe with SmartID (Electronic ID card) with the user accounts in our Active Directory, It is ideal for authenticating our employees without a username and password, of course, we can later associate it with the rest of the services we need, if we have access via the web, Citrix… we'd just need a card reader on each piece of equipment and you're good to go, It could even be used to put a device at the front door in the office to validate physical entry, Time Management… all through smart card-based authentication.