Searching an entire Active Directory forest for certain objects…

Good evening everyone! After several weeks of dodging postings of an applied nature I figured that it might be time to do a PowerShell focused posting. I like PowerShell…

Anyhow, I recently was doing something at a client site and I wanted to find groups that contained a certain string pattern in their name. If I were searching for groups in a single domain, this would be a very simple chore. However, I wanted to find groups that matched the pattern in all domains within the forest. Technically, I could search the entire forest using the [ADSI] type adapter. However, to go get the objects from all the domains in the forest would have required me to create a DirectorySearcher object for each domain, and then search that domain.

In other words, doable… but more code then I wanted to type. So… I instead decided to use the Quest AD cmdlets and came up with the following:

$Domain = [System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Domain]::GetCurrentDomain()
$Domain.Forest.Domains | foreach {Get-QADObject -Service "$($_.name):389" -LdapFilter "(&(objectClass=group)(cn=*Pattern123*))"} | ft Name,Description

Following the two lines of code, I first create a $Domain object using the GetCurrentDomain method of the DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory.Domain class. Then using this $Domain object, I get a list of all of the domains in the forest. Next, I loop through that list of domain and search for the groups matching my defined pattern using the Get-QADObject.

Simple...

If you like this, check out some other posts from Tyson:

• When a computer science degree matters, and when it doesn't
• Since when did cloud computing become/need a manifesto?
• Why would one phish using a Certificate Authority (CA) as bait?
• Would I trust you, if everyone else trusted you?
• Here is a good question: Is scripting programming or just systems administration?
• PowerShell boy and the case of the missing cmdlets!
• Fun with PowerShell 2.0 Eventing!
• Creating a custom 404 page to handle link redirection for ASP.NET web applications

Or if you want, you can also check out some of Tyson's latest publications:

• Windows PowerShell Unleashed (2^ndEdition)
• Windows Server 2008 Unleashed (Yes, I did help on this book)

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