Semi-Automatic Account Maintenance

Continuing in my “semi-automatic” theme, here’s some information on using command-line utilities to help automate account maintenance. By combining dsquery and a third-party replacement for dsmove (since dsmove has some problems), we can streamline account maintenance policies for Active Directory.

First, the problem with dsmove. The dsmove.exe utility is supposed to be able to take DNs on standard input (stdin) and move them (with or without a rename operation at the same time) to a new location in Active Directory. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work; for some reason, dsmove won’t accept the output of dsquery, even though that output works with dsmod and dsrm. I found numerous references to this same problem (here’s one) via a Google search, so I know I’m not alone.

Fortunately, there’s a free third-party replacement that steps up to the plate to fill in for dsmove, and it’s called AdMod. AdMod does more than just move objects; it can also modify objects as well. For our purposes, however, we’re just going to use it to move objects.

We’ll start out with the dsquery command again, this time to find inactive accounts:

dsquery user -inactive 4

This will find all the user accounts have have been inactive (not logged into) for more than 4 weeks. Pipe this into the dsmod command to automatically disable them:

dsquery user -inactive 4 | dsmod user -disabled yes

This ensures that any account that has not been used in more than 4 weeks will be automatically disabled. Now, we can bring in AdMod to help us keep those disabled accounts manageable:

dsquery user -disabled | admod -move "ou=Disabled \
Accounts,dc=example,dc=net" -safety 100

This will automatically gather all the disabled accounts and move them into the Disabled Accounts OU automatically. Note the -safety 100 parameter; this means that if more than 100 objects will be affected, the command won’t proceed. This can be replaced with the -unsafe parameter if this fail-safe isn’t necessary.

So, put this into a batch file, schedule it to run once a week, and it will take care of those inactive accounts that are no longer being used. (This will make those security guys pretty happy.)

Metadata and Navigation