Handling time is somehow challenging task. It can;t be stopped so far so we have to live with schedules and clocks. But this won't be about time physics but more mundane thing. One of my friends has asked me question how to translate pwdLastSet attribute value to some more readable value. My first answer was - what a suprise - adfind.exe. Adfind ...

It looks like we have to remeber new acronym for tool name - ADTD which stands for Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is, as I see it, replacement for older tool known for some people like ADMap. It allows You to build Visio diagram representing Active Directory configuration based on data from catalog itself. ADTD can do this through ...

Today on microsoft.public.windows.server.active_directory newsgroup somebody came with a question how he can remove and add workstations to domain, without performing this operation manually on every workstation? Because of some DR situation he had 250 workstations which were a member of non-existing domain and new AD, and wanted to add them ...

I was working lately on some code which utilizes Active Directory and I came across problem that trying to access some of objects raised an exception with E_ADS_BAD_PATHNAME message. After short investigation I found out that this objects for which this exception was raised had slash character in distinguishedName. These objects were ...

Yesterday I was at customer site to talk about identity management and as it often happens some other topics were discussed with customer tech stuff after discussing main topics. In this discussion I was asked how to read and parse security descriptor for  Active Directory object. After few questions we came to conclusion that they need this ...

Vista introduces several new functionality and few of then (to be specific two) requires our AD environment to get prepared through schema extension. These schema extension needed to run new Vista's features will be part of LH schema, but LH is still somewhere behind the horizon and we have to take care about it by ourselves. Two new ...

If You are developer and You have to utilize Active Directory or ADAM in Your application .NET System.DirectoryServices (S.DS) namespace is nice thing to have. It simplifies operation performed against Active Directory, hiding all COM stuff behind relatively few different classes You can use to query and modify directory objects. ...

Recently my friend wrote simple app which is querying AD for some data, and he sent me LDAP filter to check - this filter was completely OK, but not very straightforward to read. Yesterday I came across similar usage of objectCategory attribute in LDAP filter, and I don't think it was used in this way intentionally, so I decided to give this ...

Hmm ... first the question? How many of readers is aware of Linked Value Replication (LVR) in Active Directory? If what I think about readers of this blog is true probably majority of readers is very aware what this is and how it works. At the end I don't have any survey site to perform such survey so we will not get results. But for ...

Another quick and dirty example how one can user ADMod and ADFind to do something in AD quickly and without scripting. This time question is - how to rename users account, with rename I understand changing their RDN in directory? I will use ADFind to find users and prepare input for ADMod like I did it last time, and then I will use -rename ...