Thanks everybody for your input!
Regards,
Mylo
joe wrote:
As Rick said, it is tight security or ease of use. These things tend to be
mutually exclusive. Good security is rarely easy. You are balancing between
locked down and useability. But yes, in answer to your original question, it
is not possible to have a completely locked down separation of duties
between DAs and Exchange Admins in a single forest deployment. Yes,
impossible. Microsoft did not build the products so this was possible. AD is
specifically designed so that DAs can take control of anything. The
permissions in Exchange and how they are layed out are such that you have to
put a painful number of ACEs (including a bunch of denies) that are
generally not good AD Practices for SD handling.
The bare minimum would be like a 5.5 deployment. You have a NOS forest and
you have an Exchange forest, the GAL data goes directly into the Exchange
forest and it trusts the NOS forest for security principals. The more data
you want in the NOS forest the more syncing that has to start happening.
IMO, the Exchange forest should be completely locked down, and all
provisioning should be done through good provisioning tools that log
everything and people don't do things natively in the domain.
As to the other questions, yes, you need to set up a complete test
environment. This should exist anyway, you should be testing all changes in
it because any change could blow out any aspect of the functionality. While
MS is generally pretty good about not blowing your functionality out of the
water, it isn't unheard of and it is best to find that in the QA environment
or test environment versus production. Further, IMO, anyone who allows auto
updates to servers, especially servers with truly critical business
functions should NEVER autoupdate for ANYTHING. Everything should be
manually pushed after it is fully tested and known to be good and that way
you can watch over the server as it updates and reboots or continues on its
ways. If after doing 20 or 30 servers of one type and they are going well,
you can lighten up a little and mass blast them to the same type of servers
but anything else is a bit reckless in my opinion.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mylo
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 4:30 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] My endless question day continued- Exchange attri
butes
Rick,
Thanks for the response and of course you're right. The difficulty though
lies with the complexity you refer to. Case in point.... Exchange Resource
Forests. There's a lack of detailed documentation on the MS site. I've been
looking at a dual forest solution with an E2k3 forest having an external
trust to an account forest and I'm trying to establish what functionality,
if any, Exchange-wise, is lost (compared to a normal single forest
deployment). I know it's not a particularly common deployment scenario
(unless maybe MCS are involved) and that this is an AD group ;-)... but I
suspect, short of building a PoC environment or answers from the group,
finding out things like mailbox delegation...whether FE/BE topology works
etc, means test test test :-)
Mylo
Rick Kingslan wrote:
Mylo,
I'll answer this, and when joe gets back online later, I'm sure that
he'll correct me. <j/k joe!>
In my mind, you have two choices - a secure and workable solution with
separation with a potential of added complexity, or a much less secure,
combined environment.
I have a saying that goes with this:
Security != Easy, or "Security and ease of use are diametrically opposed"
Everyone has to make decisions based upon what their sensitivity to risk
is.
Rick
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mylo
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 11:55 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] My endless question day continued- Exchange
attri butes
Apologies for jumping into a semi-dead thread with some OT questions ..
Joe, you mentioned the following:
Exchange never would have been brought into the main production forest,
it would have been in a dedicated single domain resource forest that
was entirely managed by the Exchange admins.
Are you saying that the Resource (Exchange) Forest is the only
workable solution in your mind that provides the necessary separation?
I can see it from the whole service autonomy and isolation argument,
but the fact that you need to throw provisioning into the equation,
issues such as potential single points of failure with MIIS/IIFP, added
complexity etc.... surely that single AD forest/domain is more
preferable :-)
Cheers,
Mylo
joe wrote:
In my last job we sort of did. I say sort of because you get the point
where
you are going against AD best practices in how many ACEs you are
sticking
in
the directory. The mechanisms we were thinking about to get around
some of the issues such as modifying property sets had PSS looking at
us and
shaking
their heads indicating that doing so could certainly impact their
thoughts on how supportable we were. Basically we granted I think one
property set and a few more attributes to the Exchange Service Admins
but didn't do any of the denies to remove some property set rights
they shouldn't have had, say like ability to modify UPNs etc.
The specific details are lost to me now on what exactly we did but I
wasn't thrilled with the options.
If I had it all over to do again for that company, Exchange never
would
have
been brought into the main production forest, it would have been in a
dedicated single domain resource forest that was entirely managed by
the Exchange admins.
joe
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Rascher,
Raymond
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 7:41 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] My endless question day continued- Exchange
attri butes
Did you implement a Split permissions model for exchange? If so I
would
like
to hear how you ACL'd the directory.
Also, if anyone has experience creating and using permission sets and
can point me in the right direction that would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Ray
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of joe
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 6:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] My endless question day continued- Exchange
attributes
Strictly according to Microsoft, Full Mailbox access given to a user
should NOT give the ability to send a message as that user. However,
this has been broken I think more than it has worked; broken meaning
users with Full Mailbox access on a mailbox but not Send As rights can
send as that user. I don't even recall right now if the latest
functionality in E2K3 is broken
or
it works. I think it is actually broken but it depends on HOW you try
to send the email. I do know that it has flipped back and forth.
Receive as from everything I have seen is ONLY used in the config
container.
When applied to a user object in the domain partition it doesn't seem
to impart anything. I could easily be wrong, but that has been my
experience.
Permissions written to the config partition can impact an entire DB,
an entire store, an entire server, an entire SG, or an entire AG, or
all of Exchange, it really depends on what level you put it. You
certainly can't set user level perms there. The perms set in the
config are the ones you
see
that show inherited when you look at the actual mailbox permissions.
Again when modifying the ACL on a mailbox in the supported way (i.e.
through
mailboxrights), you have to understand that if the mailbox is
instantiated, you are actually writing permissions to the store via
MAPI. These are then later shipped out and stamped on the
msExchMailboxSecurityDescriptor. If
the
mailbox isn't instantiated, then you will be writing to the AD
attribute directly and you will quickly notice that no inherited
permissions are listed, it should be, and it has been a bit since I
looked, simply SELF
with
access on the ACL.
Permissions for Exchange are extremely convoluted and weird to say the
least. nTSecurityDescriptor permissions applied to config Exchange
service objects come into play, permissions in
msExchMailboxSecurityDescriptor come into play, permissions set in the
store for the mailbox itself come into play, MAPI properties which are
actually just fields in the mailbox pretend to be permissions (or
roles) and come into play at the calendar and other folder level, and
even permissions set on the nTSecurityDescriptor
attribute
of the user objects comes into play. Specifically in the last case is
Send As which is the permission for someone to send a message as
someone and
have
it look like it came directly from the person. It doesn't stop there
though,
you also have publicDelegates attribute which grants permissions to
Send On Behalf of someone else. You also have basically a "hack" to
allow for
hidden
membership on DLs. There are other things. Every time I dig more into
Exchange I tend to bang my forehead a lot. Consquently my forehead is
8.63%
(+/- .005%) flatter than it was prior to me having to worry at all
about Exchange.
joe
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kern, Tom
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 10:20 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] My endless question day continued- Exchange
attributes
I've read(haven't tested) in the Exchange Server Cookbook that giving
Full mailbox access in ADUC on the user attrib, that doen't
automatically give Send As perm.
Also, excuse me for being clueless, but I always thought Receive As
gave
you
the right to open a mailbox and view it, when set on the mailbox via ADUC?
Is that wrong?
When you write "on the config container ACLs...", thats setting that
right on the enitre store not just one mailbox.
Aside from editing the msFxchMailboxSecurityDescriptor, is there any
other way to modify the ACLs on just one mailbox?
Thanks
-----Original Message-----
From: joe [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:19 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] My endless question day continued- Exchange
attributes
Receive As rights would be on the AD Object ACL, not the Exchange
mailbox ACL. From what I have seen, that won't do anything for you.
The only place
I
have seen Receive As do anything is when it is in combination with
Send As on the config container ACLs for Exchange and then the pair
are converted
to
Full Mailbox rights inside of the store.
If you set permissions on an non-instantiated mailbox again, the
permissions
are set on the msExchMailboxSecurityDescriptor attribute. That is
supposed to be used for setting up the initial store permissions,
HOWEVER, I have seen this work pretty flakey through the years so I
have gotten in the
habit
of not setting permissions on mailboxes until I know they have been
instantiated in the store.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kern, Tom
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 5:44 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] My endless question day continued- Exchange
attributes
If the box is not instantiated then when you edit that attribute, it
doesn't
get mirrored back to the mailbox in the store.
That's what I've seen and read.
Just trying to confirm that.
So if I "create" a mailbox and give another user "receive as" rights
before the first user has opened outlook or received an email, that
won't be reflected on the mailbox store after he/she has had the box
instantiated.
Is that correct?
Just curious.
Thanks
--------------------------
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