LDAP Active Directory

Finding the DN (distinguished name) of a user in Active Directory:

You may be aksed to define a DN so that a service can bind to it to authenticate a query. Each user in Active Directory has a distinguished name. However, you cannot find it through the ADUC tool.

From a command prompt on your domain controller type: ldifde -f c:\export.txt

View the export.txt file in Notepad and do a find on the username. For example, you do a find on username zimbrauser. You will see something like this:

CN=zimbrauser,OU=External,DC=exonline,DC=intranet

This means that zimbrauser is in the OU called External in your AD forest exonline.intranet.