I don’t think we’ve come across such applications, fortunately for us. We have had IT folks say **they** need DA rights because they need to be in the Administrators group on a whole lot of computers or need to control a large number of AD objects. Or they want a **service account** to have DA rights. We have been able to give them what they need in these cases without adding any more DA accounts. Most of the time it’s just a matter of making sure your AD objects are organized into the proper OUs.
We come across third party apps that need to use AD auth, but that generally just requires a regular domain user account with no rights other than the usual read-only rights that all AD users have. Of course your scenario may be entirely different than anything we’ve had to deal with. *From:* [email protected] [mailto: [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife *Sent:* Wednesday, June 29, 2016 6:06 PM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* RE: [NTSysADM] Enterprise Admin best practice What do you do about applications that “need” domain admin rights? I think this is simply lazy coding on the vendors’ part, but sometimes we just can’t get the dang things working without DA. That’s our weakest point, we have a ton of service accounts in the DA group. *From:* [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected] <[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *Charles F Sullivan *Sent:* Wednesday, June 29, 2016 7:22 AM *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* RE: [NTSysADM] Enterprise Admin best practice That’s more generous than what we do. The Enterprise and Schema Admins groups are empty, enforced by a Restricted Groups GPO setting. There is another one of these that limits membership in Domain Admins to just the 5 of us who are supposed to be. In the rare case where something needs Enterprise or Schema Admin rights, we temporarily add one of the domain admins via the respective Restricted Group setting. We only have one large domain, which makes this quite feasible. Possibly a more complex forest wouldn’t be. *From:* [email protected] [mailto: [email protected]] *On Behalf Of *Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife *Sent:* Tuesday, June 28, 2016 5:49 PM *To:* 'NT System Admin Issues Discussion list' <[email protected] > *Subject:* [NTSysADM] Enterprise Admin best practice I remember hearing, I believe on this list, that the best practice for the Enterprise Admin role was to only have a service account in that role, with a very complex password, that is written down and locked in a file cabinet. I’ve just implemented that, but now I’m getting blowback. Does anyone have anything in writing that talks about this process, and that yes, this is best practice? Thanks, Joe Heaton
