Also, if you have the proper AD logging enabled, you should be able to find out 
where the 3rd party services are failing without Domain Admin.

And do the world a favor, complain that requiring DA for their 3rd party 
solution is not acceptable!

 

Daniel Wolf

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Charles F Sullivan
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2016 9:02 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] Enterprise Admin best practice

 

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]>  
[mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 
] On Behalf Of Heaton, Joseph@Wildlife
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2016 6:06 PM
To: [email protected] <mailto:[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]>  
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charles F Sullivan
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2016 7:22 AM
To: [email protected] <mailto:[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]>  
[mailto:[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] 
<mailto:[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


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