RE: [ActiveDir] When and how often are EA rights needed?

Dan Holme Tue, 14 Mar 2006 15:16:47 -0800

Title: When and how often are EA rights needed?

Check out the Delegation paper I mentioned… EA has a lot of delegations… the few I mentioned there are the most important DAY-TO-DAY. There are tons of detailed, techy/geeky things that are critical to AD internals & security… you want to keep those things “tightly” secured and delegate OUT the day-to-day stuff.

Dan

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 10:00 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] When and how often are EA rights needed?

Case study: One client of mine (100k employees) has only three accounts in the EA group, which in their case is in a dedicated forest root. I don’t believe they’ve used the accounts on over a year. Another client (global financial services company) has ONLY the default Administrator account in EA, and that account has had a three-way password created: three admins each entered PART of a password, the password “pieces” were put into an envelope in a physically secure location in Europe and another in N.America. AFAIK they haven’t used it since they locked the account down.

So how do they manage and t.shoot their AD?

Read the MS doc “Best practices for AD Delegation” to effectively delegate your forest, PARTICULARLY if you have more than one domain in your forest. The things that tend to get “missed” that impact day-to-day or even occasional operations are things like delegating the creation of sites, subnets, and site links; the ability to kick off replication (not recommended but…); and authorize new DHCP Servers. I’m sure that others on the list will have other tips as well.

IMHO, if you have rights to do all the above, you are an EA equivalent any way :)

Thnanks for the comments.

neil

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dan Holme
Sent: 14 March 2006 16:51
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [ActiveDir] When and how often are EA rights needed?

EA “rights”, once a forest is deployed and delegated, are needed only for “in case of emergency break glass” – i.e. pretty much never. When you’re talking EA, you’re pretty much talking the Administrator account of the forest root domain (first domain installed), so think of them one and the same—you will be locking down that Administrator account to lock down EA. Either it’s the ONLY account in the EA group (default) or any other account in EA should be locked down pretty much equivalently.

The “break glass” scenario is, particularly in a multi-domain forest, someone does some nasty delegation (ACL modification) that effectively “locks out” an OU. Just like you could, theoretically, “lock yourself out” of an NTFS folder. Just like an NTFS folder, the “owner” of the folder ALWAYS can change the ACL, and open it back up again. In AD the “owner” is EA… it owns the forest. So, one container at a time, EA will be able to dig down and unblock.

Dan

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, March 14, 2006 9:29 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ActiveDir] When and how often are EA rights needed?

We're trying to understand when EA rights are needed within a multi domain forest, where each domain represents a fairly autonomous region.

Mgmt have suggested that the following is true :
- EA not needed on daily basis
- EA rights rarely needed after initial deployment

Can anyone please throw a few reasons at me why you would need EA rights on a daily basis? Troubleshooting? Diagnosis?

How would you be impacted if you had to request access to a EA account each time it was required?

I'd like to build a case whereby we have permanent EAs and would like some additional ammo from you guys :)

***Feel free to argue against my views and explain to me how/why you *could* manage a forest such as the above, without access to an EA account on a daily basis.

Thanks,
neil

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