LDAP Active Directory

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

You may be asked 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.


ADSIEDIT.MSC

One of the free tools available for Windows 2003 is ADSIEdit[1]. You can grab this with the tools that come on the CD or through Microsoft. ADSIEdit exposes the raw LDAP-like underbelly of AD, and allows you to see objects and attributes, and run LDAP queries. It will easily allow you to find the full path of any object.

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