ad-join Cookbook

This is a library cookbook that will join a windows computer to a windows AD domain

Requirements

Chef >= 12.5.1

This leverages custom resources so it will not work on chef versions older than 12.5.1

Tested on:

Windows 2012R2

Attributes

default['ad-join']['windows']['update_hostname'] = true

Set to false if you want the domain name/hostname to be different from the chef node name. (see #5).

default['ad-join']['windows']['double_reboot'] = true

Will continue to reboot windows until joined to domain and breadcrumb c:\\Windows\\chef-ad-join.txt exists.

default['ad-join']['windows']['visual_warning'] = false

If visual_warning = true, windows will display a login warning to anyone who connects via RDP to the machine before chef has finished the reboots and the converge. This will override any group policy your company might have in place for displaying custom login messages.

Usage

This cookbook is a library cookbook and is intended to be used by your own wrapper cookbook. See the [recipes directory](./recipes) for examples.

It contains a custom resource named domain_join that takes 5 properties

• domain
• domain_user
• domain_password
• ou
• server (optional)

example:

domain_join 'foobar' do
  domain          'example.com'
  domain_user     'binduser'
  domain_password 'correct-horse-battery-staple'
  ou              'OU=US,OU=West,OU=Web,DC=example,DC=com'
  server          'DC01' #Optional
end

The ou must be formatted with OU= before each organizational unit and DC= before each domain component. see [recipes/example_complex.rb](./recipes/example_complex.rb) for an example of how to derive the OU from attributes.

Behind the scenes

If you bootstrapped the node with the name option; e.g.

knife bootstrap -N us-web01

Then that is the name that will be used to join the domain (not the hostname since windows randomly generates it on first boot)

The name cannot include control characters, leading or trailing spaces, or any of the following characters: / \ [ ].

In most cases, Windows hostnames must be 15 characters or less.

The cookbook creates a windows scheduled task that runs chef as soon as the VM is started. The scheduled task is deleted after all the reboots.

The cookbook will restart windows twice since some group policy objects (like the time zone) are not applied on first boot. You can change this behavior by changing the following attribute to false.

default['ad-join']['windows']['double_reboot'] = true  

License and Authors

Authors:

Volodymyr Babchynskyy vbabch@softserveinc.com

Spencer Owen sowen@netdocuments.com