objUser.AccountExpirationDate = #03\/01\/2008#\n<\/PRE>\nWhy the little pound signs (#) around the date? That\u2019s actually optional; we could have enclosed the date in double quote marks instead. However, in VBScript the pound signs specify that the value in question is a date-time value. It\u2019s a good idea (dare we say a \u201cbest practice?\u201d) to enclose your date-time values in pound signs; that helps guard against VBScript mistakenly viewing the value as a string, or even as a mathematical equation (e.g., 3 divided by 1 divided by 2008).<\/P>\n
After assigning a value to the AccountExpirationDate attribute we then call the SetInfo<\/B> method and officially write the change to the System Account Manager (SAM) on atl-ws-01. For those of you unfamiliar with the method, SetInfo is roughly equivalent to the Save command in an application such as Microsoft Word. You can type as much stuff into a Word document as you want, but if you never save the document then all that effort is for naught. The same is true when you use ADSI to modify attribute values. We can assign any value we want to AccountExpirationDate (or any other attribute, for that matter), but those changes do not take effect until we call SaveInfo. If the script ends without us calling SaveInfo then those changes will never<\/I> take effect.<\/P>\n
And sure, you can get a little fancy here. For example, suppose you want to give Ken Myer a temporary, 30-day account on atl-ws-01. Here\u2019s a script that sets the expiration date to the current date plus 30 days:<\/P>
Set objUser = GetObject(“WinNT:\/\/atl-ws-01\/kenmyer”)<\/p>\nobjUser.AccountExpirationDate = Date + 30 \nobjUser.SetInfo\n<\/PRE>\n
Well, we did say a little<\/I> fancy. But you get the idea.<\/P>\n
Of course, if you\u2019re going to go around changing account expiration dates that means that, sooner or later, you\u2019ll need to verify those expiration dates for all the local accounts on atl-ws-01. Good thing we had this verify-account-expiration-dates script lying around, isn\u2019t it:<\/P>
On Error Resume Next<\/p>\nSet objAccounts = GetObject(“WinNT:\/\/atl-ws-01”)\nobjAccounts.Filter = Array(“User”)<\/p>\n
For Each objUser In objAccounts\n If IsNull(objUser.AccountExpirationDate) Then\n Wscript.Echo objUser.Name, “Account has no expiration date.”\n Else\n Wscript.Echo objUser.Name, objUser.AccountExpirationDate\n End If\nNext\n<\/PRE>\n
All we\u2019re doing here is connecting to the SAM on atl-ws-01, then applying a Filter<\/B> to ensure that the only items we get back are user accounts. (Otherwise we\u2019d get back groups and printers and services and everything else known to the SAM.) After applying the filter we set up a For Each loop to loop through the entire collection of user accounts; inside that loop we use the IsNull<\/B> function to identify accounts that don\u2019t have<\/I> an expiration date:<\/P>If IsNull(objUser.AccountExpirationDate) Then\n<\/PRE>\nIf AccountExpirationDate is null we echo back a message to that effect; otherwise we echo back the user name and the account expiration date:<\/P>
Wscript.Echo objUser.Name, objUser.AccountExpirationDate\n<\/PRE>\nThe end result is something that looks like this:<\/P>
Administrator Account has no expiration date.\nASPNET Account has no expiration date.\nGuest Account has no expiration date.\nHelpAssistant Account has no expiration date.\nkenmyer 3\/1\/2008\npilarackerman 6\/1\/2007\n<\/PRE>\nSo much for the VBScript version. As for the Windows PowerShell version, well, we\u2019ll let June take care of that. <\/P>\n
You know, we just thought of something: if we could find someone to write the VBScript<\/I> version for us, well \u2026.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I configure an expiration date for a local user account?— GW Hey, GW. You know, it\u2019s amazing how quickly things change in the fast-paced world of system administration scripting. For example, in Monday\u2019s column we announced that, as time allowed and whenever possible, the Scripting Guys would include a Windows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":595,"featured_media":87096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,24,3,5],"class_list":["post-65143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scripting","tag-local-accounts-and-windows-nt-4-0-accounts","tag-other-directory-services","tag-scripting-guy","tag-vbscript"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"
Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I configure an expiration date for a local user account?— GW Hey, GW. You know, it\u2019s amazing how quickly things change in the fast-paced world of system administration scripting. For example, in Monday\u2019s column we announced that, as time allowed and whenever possible, the Scripting Guys would include a Windows […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/595"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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