In this day and age having an on-premise Active Directory is not mandatory, especially if you are a small and/or new organization. Most of the services will be in Microsoft 365 anyways, so why bother maintaining local AD?

If you have an Azure Active Directory Tenant, users are allowed to join Windows 10 devices to the AAD domain by default.

In the AAD Portal, under Devices > Device Settings, settings can be adjusted to the organization's needs.

Joining the device is very easy. Just open the modern Settings app in Windows 10 > Accounts > Access work or school > + Connect. Then select Join this device to Azure Active Directory.

After logging off, any user that is a member of the tenant can log in with their email address/Azure AD account.

It is not possible to delete or rename a folder that contains a blank space at the end with Windows Explorer. It can only be done by using this cmd command:

rd "\.\C:\temp\my folder "

References:

https://superuser.com/questions/198256/how-to-delete-a-folder-containing-trailing-spaces

You probably have stumbled upon this common problem: When logging into a Domain Computer with a Domain user, this error appears: The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.

What does it mean? Well, it basically means that the Domain Computer cannot authenticate against Active Directory, because the Computer Account password on the workstation is not valid anymore (this can occur when using Sytem Restore or when restoring from a backup).

How do you solve this issue? Pretty easy. Just remove the computer from the Domain and re-join. That works, but there is a cleaner and faster solution with one line of PowerShell code:

Test-ComputerSecureChannel -Repair -Credential (Get-Credential)

You will need to enter domain user credentials that can create or modify computer accounts in the Active Directory Domain.

You can check if the password of the Domain computer changed by viewing the attribute pwLastSet in the Attribute Editor.

So here is a challenge I had to face today: I created a virtual machine (VM) in Azure from a custom image that was previously Sysprep'd by me. The image contained several applications intended to run on a RDSH (Remote Desktop Session Host) for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (former XenApp), so the RDS role was also installed. The VM was not part of the domain, it was in a Workgroup and it could not reach the RDS license server. Which meant: I could not RDP into the machine to perform Domain Join. And if you already have some experience with Microsoft Azure, you will know that there is no Remote Console like in VMware or Hyper-V.

The VM was still reachable over the network. So here are four PowerShell commands that allowed me to remotely perform a Domain Join on that particular machine. Nothing fancy, but it might come in handy.

$Server="10.10.10.10"

Set-Item -Path WSMan:\localhost\Client\TrustedHosts -Value $Server -Confirm:$false -Force

This credential variable stores the local username and password of the computer. Something like computername\admin along with the password.

$Cred = Get-Credential

Add-Computer -DomainName "ajni.lab" -Restart

After executing the last command you will be prompted to insert domain credentials. The user obviously must have the right to create computers in the domain.

Here is a cool trick that not everyone might know (I didn't).

If you want to open Task Manager inside an RDP session, CTRL+ALT+DEL won't work, right? That key combination would trigger on your local computer.

For remote sessions, there is CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.

This shortcut directly opens Task Manager, no additional steps required!