Boswell's Q&A

Active Directory Cleanser

Cull unused or deleted accounts using the LDIFDE tool and some scripting trickery.

• By Bill Boswell
• 02/01/2004

Bill: I'm trying to clean up stale and unused AD user accounts. For accounts that logged in at least once, I can use the USRSTAT resource kit tool to show the last logon date and delete accounts unused for a certain period of time. For accounts that never logged in, I have no way of knowing if it's a new or old account. Is there a way or tool to get the creation date for an account so I can then determine whether or not this account can be cleaned?
—Zev

Zev: You can get the creation date for each account from Active Directory. Every AD object has a WhenCreated and WhenChanged attribute. You can dump these attributes into a flat file using the LDIFDE utility, or you can dump them into a comma-delimited file using CSVDE (both utilities come with Windows 2000).

Here's the syntax to dump the two attributes for the user objects in an OU called Phoenix in a domain called Company.com to the console for viewing (the entire entry should typed as a single line):

ldifde -d ou=phoenix,dc=company,dc=com -l whencreated, whenchanged -p onelevel -r "(ObjectCategory=user)"
-f con

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If you wanted to save the dump to a file, change the -f switch from con to a file name.

The last logon timestamp uses this format: YYYYMMDDHHMMSS, with the hour shown in Universal Coordinated Time. A time stamp of 20040115182937.0Z corresponds to Jan 15 2004 18:29:37 UCT.

USRSTAT is slow, and the report you get has to be merged with the LDIFDE dump. So, I put together a script that searches for user objects at each domain controller, then lists the local logon time and the creation time. The user logon timestamp requires conversion from a long integer. I borrowed the conversion code comes from Richard L. Mueller (www.rlmueller.net/Programs). Richard's full script also takes the local time zone from the Registry and converts the time from UCT to local time. Nifty.

'Establish ADO Constants
ADS_CHASE_REFERRALS_NEVER = &00
ADS_CHASE_REFERRALS_SUBORDINATE = &20
ADS_CHASE_REFERRALS_EXTERNAL = &40
ADS_CHASE_REFERRALS_ALWAYS = &60
ADS_SCOPE_BASE = 0
ADS_SCOPE_ONELEVEL = 1
ADS_SCOPE_SUBTREE = 2

'Get Distinguished Name for local domain
Set RootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE")
domainDN = RootDSE.Get("DefaultNamingContext")

'Initialize ADO connection
Set connection = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
connection.Provider = "ADsDSOObject"
connection.open
Set command = CreateObject("ADODB.Command")
Set command.ActiveConnection = connection
Command.Properties("Page Size") = 1000
Command.Properties("Timeout") = 30
Command.Properties("searchscope") = ADS_SCOPE_SUBTREE
Command.Properties("Chase referrals") =   ADS_CHASE_REFERRALS_NEVER
Command.Properties("Cache Results") = False

'Get list of domain controllers for the domain
Set dcList = GetObject("LDAP://ou=domain controllers," &_   domainDN)

'Walk each domain controller for logons
For Each dc In dcList
WScript.Echo String(40,"=")
WScript.Echo "Logon dates at " & dc.DNSHostName

command.CommandText = "SELECT name,lastlogon,whencreated,whenchanged FROM " &_
  "'LDAP://" & dc.DNSHostName & "/" & domainDN &"' WHERE   objectcategory = 'user'"

Set rs = command.Execute
Do Until rs.EOF
  adoLastLogon = rs.fields("lastlogon")
  On Error Resume Next
  Err.Clear
  Set longDate = adoLastLogon
  If Err.Number <> 0 Then
    Err.Clear
    logonDate = "No Local Logon"
  Else
    longDateHigh = longDate.HighPart
    longDateLow = longDate.LowPart
    If (longDateLow = 0) And (longDateHigh = 0) Then
      logonDate = "No Local Logon"
    Else
      If longDateLow < 0="" then="" longdatehigh="longDateHigh" +="">
      logonDate = #1/1/1601# + (((longDateHigh * (2 ^ 32))
        + longDateLow)/600000000/1440)
    End If
  End If

  WScript.Echo "User Name: " & rs.fields("name")
  WScript.Echo " Last logon: " & logonDate
  WScript.Echo " Object Created: " & rs.fields("WhenCreated")
  WScript.Echo " Object Modified: " & rs.fields("WhenChanged")

  rs.MoveNext
Loop

WScript.Echo vbNL
Next

WScript.Quit()

As you mentioned, Zev, Windows Server 2003 has an additional attribute called LastLogonTimestamp that replicates to every domain controller once you shift to a Windows Server 2003 functional level. You can rewrite this script to search for the contents of LastLogonTimestamp on any domain controller.

Hope this helps.