Recipe 6.14 Viewing a User s Group Membership

Recipe 6.14 Viewing a User's Group Membership

6.14.1 Problem

You want to view the group membership of a user.

6.14.2 Solution

6.14.2.1 Using a graphical user interface

1. Open the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in.

2. In the left pane, right-click on the domain and select Find.

3. Select the appropriate domain beside In.

4. Type the name of the user beside Name and click Find Now.

5. In the Search Results, double-click on the user.

6. Click the Member Of tab.

7. To view all indirect group membership (from nested groups), you'll need to double-click on each group.

6.14.2.2 Using a command-line interface

The following command displays the groups <UserDN> is a member of. Use the -expand switch to list nested group membership as well:

> dsget user <UserDN> -memberof [-expand]

6.14.2.3 Using VBScript

' This code displays the group membership of a user. ' It avoids infinite loops due to circular group nesting by  ' keeping track of the groups that have already been seen. ' ------ SCRIPT CONFIGURATION ------ strUserDN = "<UserDN>"  ' e.g. cn=jsmith,cn=Users,dc=rallencorp,dc=com ' ------ END CONFIGURATION --------- set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://" & strUserDN) Wscript.Echo "Group membership for " & objUser.Get("cn") & ":" strSpaces = "" set dicSeenGroup = CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary") DisplayGroups "LDAP://" & strUserDN, strSpaces, dicSeenGroup Function DisplayGroups ( strObjectADsPath, strSpaces, dicSeenGroup)    set objObject = GetObject(strObjectADsPath)    WScript.Echo strSpaces & objObject.Name    on error resume next ' Doing this to avoid an error when memberOf is empty    if IsArray( objObject.Get("memberOf") ) then       colGroups = objObject.Get("memberOf")    else       colGroups = Array( objObject.Get("memberOf") )    end if        for each strGroupDN In colGroups       if Not dicSeenGroup.Exists(strGroupDN) then          dicSeenGroup.Add strGroupDN, 1          DisplayGroups "LDAP://" & strGroupDN, strSpaces & " ", dicSeenGroup       end if    next End Function

6.14.3 Discussion

The memberOf attribute on user objects is multivalued and contains the list of distinguished names for the groups the user is a member. memberOf is actually linked with the member attribute on group objects, which holds the distinguished names of its members. For this reason, you cannot directly modify the memberOf attribute; you must instead modify the member attribute on the group.

The primary group of a user, which the user is technically a member of, will not be shown in either the CLI or VBScript solutions. This is due to the fact that the primary group is not stored in the memberOf attribute like the rest of the groups. See Recipe 6.15 and Recipe 7.8 for more on finding the primary group of a user.

6.14.4 See Also

Recipe 7.3 for more on viewing the nested members of a group and Recipe 10.16 for more information on linked attributes