— JK<\/P>
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<\/A> \nHey, JK. You know, as this column is being written it\u2019s a Monday here in Seattle, and it\u2019s raining. And yes, we know what you\u2019re thinking: when isn\u2019t<\/I> it raining in Seattle? Unfortunately, though, our weather is much crueler than that. After all, if it rained all the time you could plan for that and get used to it. In Seattle, though, we tend to have three or four absolutely gorgeous days: sunshine, blue skies, highs in the 80s. It\u2019s only then, just about the time you think that summer has arrived, that it rains. And rains. And, well, rains.<\/P>\n
And then, of course, it gets nice for a couple of days, we start to get our hopes up, and then the same vicious cycle repeats itself.<\/P>\n
Of course, there are two things you can do when the weather acts up like this. One thing you can do is sit around and mope, bemoaning the fate that has befallen you and doing as little work as possible. On the other hand, you can always take advantage of the opportunity and – with nothing to distract you – tackle one of those challenging problems that you\u2019ve been meaning to tackle for a long, long time. <\/P>\n
We\u2019ve chosen to mope.<\/P>
Set objDomain = GetObject(“WinNT:\/\/fabrikam”) \nSet objUser = GetObject(“”WinNT:\/\/fabrikam\/kmyer”) \nobjDomain.MoveHere objUser.AdsPath, “kenmyer”\n<\/PRE>\nYou can see why we chose to answer this question: all we had to do was write three lines of code and then we could go back to feeling sorry for ourselves. We start off by creating a pair of object references, one to the domain (objDomain) and one to the user account that we want to rename (objUser). That\u2019s what we do here:<\/P>
Set objDomain = GetObject(“WinNT:\/\/fabrikam”) \nSet objUser = GetObject(“”WinNT:\/\/fabrikam\/kmyer”)\n<\/PRE>\nAnd here\u2019s the best part. After we\u2019ve connected to the domain and to the user account it takes just one line of code to rename that account:<\/P>
objDomain.MoveHere objUser.AdsPath, “kenmyer”\n<\/PRE>\nAs you can see, all we do is call the MoveHere<\/B> method and specify two parameters:<\/P>\n
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\n \u2022<\/TD>\n \n The AdsPath<\/B> to the user account. The AdsPath uniquely identifies a user account in much the same way a UNC path uniquely identifies a file. For example, the UNC path \\\\atl-fs-01\\public\\test.txt can refer to only one file: a file named Test.txt found in the Public folder on the computer atl-ws-01. Likewise the AdsPath WinNT:\/\/fabrikam\/kmyer can refer to only one user account: an account named kmyer located in the Fabrikam domain.<\/P><\/TD><\/TR>\n
\n \u2022<\/TD>\n \n The new name (kenmyer<\/B>) to be given to the user account.<\/P><\/TD><\/TR><\/TBODY><\/TABLE>\n
And that\u2019s it: call the method, and the kmyer user account will immediately be renamed kenmyer. <\/P>\n
A few things to keep in mind here. First, neither Windows Script Host nor ADSI were available when Windows NT 4.0 first shipped. If you haven\u2019t already done so this script won\u2019t work unless you install both technologies on your domain controller. For more information, check out the Script Center FAQ<\/B><\/A>.<\/P>\n
Second, this script will<\/I> work with Active Directory user accounts; it\u2019s not limited to just NT 4.0 domains. We don\u2019t really recommend you use this with Active Directory; with a few rare exceptions you should always use the LDAP provider (as opposed to the WinNT provider) when working with Active Directory. If you have no idea what we\u2019re talking about, don\u2019t feel bad: nobody ever<\/I> has any idea what we\u2019re talking about! But you can find a reasonably good explanation of ADSI providers (as well as which one to use, and when) in the Microsoft Windows 2000 Scripting Guide<\/B><\/A>.<\/P>\n