The World According to Mitch

Distinguished Names are pretty simple, right? Well… it depends on several factors.  To figure out the DN for swmi.ca it is… dc=swmi,dc=ca.  An Organizational Unit is not much harder… Let’s take an OU called Toronto in the swmi.com domain… ou=Toronto,dc=swmi,dc=ca.  Simple.

But what happens when we add a little complexity to our environment?  Say… OUs within OUs, and domains within domains?  Here’s an example:

Domain: Canada.swmi.ca
OU: Ontario – Toronto

Okay, this is a little more complex… but it’s actually pretty easy, once you know what you are doing.

OU=Toronto,OU=Ontario,DC=Canada,DC=swmi,DC=ca

See? That’s not that much harder than the simple Distinguished name…it’s just longer.

Spaces… what happens when you add spaces into the names of your OUs?  Of course, the space is not a valid character in a domain name, but there is nothing stopping you from putting them into your OU names.  You know… aside from common sense ;’)

We know that in PowerShell (and most scripting- and command-line interfaces) you have to put quotes around names that have spaces.  But when I run a PowerShell script that includes the DN of an object, it will already have quotes around it… do I have to double-quote?

No.  Distinguished Names do not change because you are scripting.  So let’s look at an example:

Domain: Canada.swmi.ca
OU: Ontario – Toronto – File Servers

Take a deep breath… relax, and let’s do what we did before…

OU=File Servers,OU=Toronto,OU=Ontario,DC=Canada,DC=swmi,DC=ca

We can go on and on with this game… one particular client that I am working with right now has a domain with OUs embedded six levels deep.  It is crucial that I get the DN right when I am scripting… refer to my article on Failover Cluster OUs and you will see why.  My clusters must be placed in the right place.  So I spent the time to make sure I had it right… and it worked!

…So what if you are hesitant, unsure, unconfident?  Before you run your script, run a simple command to test it:

dsquery ou “OU=File Servers,OU=Toronto,OU=Ontario,DC=Canada,DC=swmi,DC=ca“

A simple dsquery should return the following response:

“OU=File Servers,OU=Toronto,OU=Ontario,DC=Canada,DC=swmi,DC=ca”

Now this isn’t very exciting… it is just parroting back to me what I said, right?  Well know that the alternative is an error message (dsquery failed: A referral was returned from the server, or dsquery failed: Directory object not found) and not getting that is golden.

Distinguished Names can be intimidating… but with a little bit of knowledge, you should be on easy street!