We were in a similar situation-  all our Service Desk (help desk) guys were 
domain admins, for example! (NWEA was a small shop of about 100 users and SD 
guys actually doubled as helping SE's stand up servers, etc, took a  while for 
them to grow out of that).

We did a big  AD reorg a couple of years ago, created some new OU's, stuck 
DA's, and servers, and service accounts in one tree of them, put users 
(including Service Desk), workstations, e-mail and most security groups in the 
other. Yanked SD guys from domain admin (took  a while to get the delegations 
right, but worth it). 

It now takes DA perms to get to the DA accounts and servers OU, SD has full 
delegation on the OU created for tings they need to manage.

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2011 7:35 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Re: Delegation question

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Christopher Bodnar 
<[email protected]> wrote:
> Our internal auditors want us to take away the ability of helpdesk 
> staff to change domain admin passwords ...

  I'd say that's a good idea.

> if all the domain admin accounts were in one OU I could do this by 
> revoking access to that OU ...

  Generally speaking, it's better to simply only add Allow permissions where 
needed, and avoid using Deny at all.  (Not sure if that's what you mean by 
"revoke" here.)

> but unfortunately that is not the case and I don't think it's possible 
> the way things are setup right now (service accounts in domain admins, 
> etc...).

  Sounds like you need to change the way things are now then.  :)

> What I'm afraid of is that something will break if I move those 
> accounts, specifically the service accounts.

  Anything you do can break things, including doing nothing.

  Observe.  Research.  Analyze.  Test.  Deploy.  In that order, going back as 
often as needed.

  Specifically, use tools like GPMC, RSOP, etc., to see what Group Policies are 
applied to those OUs, and what the resulting GP settings will be.  Then plan 
changes to your GPO/OU/link scheme that keep things intact.

-- Ben

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