I’ve been searching for a way to tell if a user is logged on in a Win2K AD domain so I could make sure that they weren’t before I moved their home directories - this is the answer, brilliant! Thanks Guys

I found this article very help in using ADSI to enumerate session. However, I was wondering if there was a way to terminate a session.

I’m having difficulties as well. It seems to run OK on my machine but on the server I get the error: "Object doesn’t support this property or method:’objIE.document.all(...).Value’" Any ideas?

I gotta say this is an awesome article. However, you truly are evil... This is worse than any cliffhanger in any Friends season finale.

You say, "Alternatively, I can pass a different set of username/password credentials over and even specify whether to use Kerberos or Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) authentication methods." How?

Informative article. Can Windows scripting be used to change settings to the default printer (i.e., set paper type and paper bin defaults)?

Thanks for this great article on using Task Scheduler to distribute jobs to remote machines. There is one major drawback that you don’t address and I was hoping you could help me overcome it. After I copy the *.job files to the remote computer, the account the job was originally setup with gets reset. Do you know how to get around this? I don’t see how this can work without it.

Hi! You mentioned the following in the article: "You can’t use VBScript to access all the read-write attributes. For example, ADSI returns the ObjectSID attribute as a byte array. Unfortunately, VBScript understands only variant arrays, which renders the returned data useless. As a result, you must use Perl, Visual Basic (VB), or C++ if you want to use ObjectSID."

I’m trying to search for a specific objectSID using LDAP, and I’m using VB.NET to run the search. Might you have any idea what the objectSID type would be in order to search for that user in the directory (e.g., convert objectSID byte array into a string? or search for the hex alphanumberic values? or something else?). I’ve been making baby steps in my application and this is possibly the last hurdle. I’ve attempted a number of things--even hardcoding my objectSID’s ASCII value--but nothing worked. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

Jerermy - If you check MSDN, you’ll find that the Object-SID is described here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/netdir/adschema/w2k/A_objectSid.asp?frame=true. Its syntax is 2.1.1.17, which according to the page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/netdir/adschema/w2k/syntaxList.asp is a String(Sid). If you click the String(Sid) link (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/netdir/adschema/w2k/S_String(Sid).asp), you can see String(Sid) is the type ADSTYPE_OCTET_STRING and the variant VT_UI1 | VT_ARRAY. You can find out more from MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/netdir/adschema/schemahelp.asp. Hope that helps.
--Alistair

I liked the article but I am generating an error when reproducing your code. It happens at the put_percentcomplete in the progressdialogbox.wsc call from the demoprogress.vbs file. It seems like WSC doesn’t have the objIE instantiated when the percentcomplete function is called. Any help on this? Am I just screwing up big? Thank you for your time!

Michael - I can’t replicate this at all I’m afraid. Are you using the code downloaded from the website?
--Alistair

I’ve seen much information in this article and many like it about manipulating print queue information and configuration, but does anyone know how to create a print queue using VBScript/ADSI? Now that would be a very useful article.

Can I disable the sAMAccountName property of the user class? When I try to set the sAMAccountName property data to more than 25 characters, it gives me an error like Automation error. Are there other possibilities?

Sneha - No, I’m afraid you cannot disable the sAMAccountName. As this MSDN page http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/netdir/ad/naming_properties.asp indicates, it’s an important property for Win2K servers and needs to be unique on a per-domain basis. It should be less than 20 characters to support downlevel servers and clients. The exact definitions are here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/netdir/adschema/w2k/A_sAMAccountName.asp
--Alistair

Is there a way to check if a user account exists on Win 2000 to determine if the container::create (username...) is necessary?

Charles - Use the SearchAD function from article 5 in the ADSI Primer series (May 1999) to search the AD first using ADO.

Note that September 1999 contained a correction to that article.
--Alistair