Active Directory Distinguished Names

By Dan DiNicolo, July 19th, 2001 Posted in Windows 2000. Subscribe to our RSS Feed

Active Directory functions mainly through the use of a protocol referred to as LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. An open and defined standard for accessing directories, LDAP provides the mechanism for updating information, querying, and defining objects in the directory. For example, every object in Active Directory is represented by what is called an LDAP distinguished name. This name uniquely identifies the object within the entire directory. For example, the distinguished name for a user account object named Dan DiNicolo that exists in the Information Technology organizational unit in the 2000trainers.com domain would be:

CN=Dan DiNicolo, OU=Information Technology, DC=2000trainers, DC=com

An LDAP distinguished name is made up of three main elements

• CN – Common Name, the name of the object within Active Directory.
• OU – Organizational Unit, the name of the Organizational Unit within Active Directory. Note that built-in containers, such as Users, would use CN= instead of OU= in an LDAP distinguished name.
• DC – Domain Component, the DNS domain name in which the object exists, represented one domain level at a time, starting with lower-level domains and ending with top-level domains.

Another two quick examples:

CN=John Doe, CN=Users, DC=domain, DC=com would represent a user object named John Doe whose account exists in the Users built-in container in a domain named domain.com

CN=Jane Doe, OU=Sales, OU=Toronto, DC=canada, DC=company, DC=net would represent a user object name Jane Doe, whose account exists in an OU called Sales, which is a sub-OU of an OU named Toronto, which is in a domain named canada.company.net

Another way of defining objects within Active Directory is via the object’s relative distinguished name. Quite simply, a relative distinguished name is just a shorter way of describing an object based on where we are focused. For example, if I were looking in the OU called Sales, which is a sub OU of the OU Toronto, in the canada.company.net domain, I could say that the relative distinguished name of the object I previously described is CN=Jane Doe.

Written by Dan DiNicolo - Visit Website

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