Supposing Everything; Knowing Nothing! - Random thoughts about useless things.

If you’ve got an active directory group with a lot of members, this command can be helpful.  It returns all users in the group you specify.  Easily piped into a text file for quick reporting. dsquery group -name "adGroup"|dsget group -members|dsget user -samid -email -display

Quick command to list all users in an AD group

Supposing Everything; Knowing Nothing! - Random thoughts about useless things.

Pretty simple and straight forward. Just another useful dsquery command. This one returns all computers in the domain. dsquery * domainroot -filter "&(ObjectCategory=computer)" -attr distinguishedName -limit 0

FInd all computer accounts in a domain

Supposing Everything; Knowing Nothing! - Random thoughts about useless things.

Here is a quick way to retrieve the last logon date and time of a user.  This queries AD  for a specific username and returns distinquishedName, lastLogon and lastLogonTimestamp.  In a domain with only 1 DC, lastlogon will be what you use.  However, in a multiple DC domain all domain controllers will have different lastLogon [...]

Return the name and last logon of a user

Supposing Everything; Knowing Nothing! - Random thoughts about useless things.

From time to time I like to run this command to see what computers have been inactive for x weeks. In this case, it’s all computer inactive for 10 weeks dsquery computer -inactive 10 Once I verify I want to delete them all, I run the below statement. The statement uses Directory Services Restore Mode [...]

Delete computer accounts who haven’t checked into active directory in x weeks

Supposing Everything; Knowing Nothing! - Random thoughts about useless things.

In a larger AD environments it’s hard to find which OU a user or computer may be in.  If you want to apply policy to that OU only, or maybe there is a template user in that OU, I use these commands to speed up the process of locating them. #determine what OU a computer [...]

Find the organizational unit a computer or user is in