So, I have to guarantee you that I can recover the contacts in this OU...

Oops Department, Exchange, Clustering, SQL, Windows Security, LCS, Misc.

Windows Server Clustering — Wed, 18 May 2005 20:50:10 GMT

re: So, I have to guarantee you that I can recover the contacts in this OU...

Rob Gibson — Wed, 18 May 2005 21:04:44 GMT

Thanks for the informative article. I have used LDIFDE/CSVDE for creating AD object backups and to copy them into test lab domains. One thing that has troubled me with LDIFDE is that there is considerable find/repacing needed to make object updates (versus adds). Would you happen to have or know of a similar script to modify an LDIF export to alter the 'changetype:' and to add the '-' at the record's end?

Perl solution

Gary MacDonald — Wed, 18 May 2005 21:48:49 GMT

Here are two Perl one-line scripts that illustrate how to manipulate an LDIFDE export file, converting it to an import file.

Each of the export files massaged by the scripts below contained only one or more records consisting of the dn: and changetype: fields, separated by a blank line. The ldifde command that created the export files specified a nonexistent property with the -l parameter so that no properties would be output.

The first script adds the msExchMasterAccountSid property with the SELF SID.

perl -pe "s/: add/: modify\nadd: msExchMasterAccountSid\nmsExchMasterAccountSid:: AQEAAAAAAAUKAAAA/;s/^$/-\n/;" export.tmp > import.tmp

The second scripts deletes the msExchMasterAccountSid property.

perl -pe "s/: add/: modify\ndelete: msExchMasterAccountSid/;s/^$/-\n/;" export.tmp > import.tmp

The '-' at the end of each record is added with the s/^$/-\n/ substitution.

re: So, I have to guarantee you that I can recover the contacts in this OU...

Christian Schindler — Wed, 18 May 2005 22:00:17 GMT

LDIFDE is a cool tool. But the CSVDE output would be easier to handle in excel - the pitty is that csvde isn't able to modify objects... I always asked myself why this limitation exists... :-(

re: So, I have to guarantee you that I can recover the contacts in this OU...

Adam Gates — Wed, 18 May 2005 22:17:05 GMT

My users have the description field populated with "(07878)" each user has their own employee number. The code is setup to ignore the first "(".
Create a file called DNmapping.bat and drop this into it;

echo off
@for /F %%I in (%1) DO (
@ldifde -f tempout.txt -r "(description=*%%I*)" -l dn
@type tempout.txt >> outfile.txt
)
echo on

Create a text file with the employeeIDs like this;
07878
12345
87456

From Cmd line run "DNmapping.bat employeeid.txt"
LDIFDE will search AD match the number and return the results to the Outfile.txt

Thank Dan (Shady) Winter for the simple but useful code!

re: So, I have to guarantee you that I can recover the contacts in this OU...

Stu — Wed, 18 May 2005 23:03:56 GMT

I've seen issues with creating contacts using LDIFDE where you don't set the legacyExchangeDN setting (this is in Exchange mixed mode). Any comment on that?

Weekend reading

subject: exchange — Fri, 20 May 2005 11:38:19 GMT

re: So, I have to guarantee you that I can recover the contacts in this OU...

Safwan — Wed, 25 May 2005 11:32:12 GMT

I have been trying to use LDIFDE to export all the attributes of a specific object in AD, I know that by using the –L switch, you can specify which attributes you want to dump and that omitting the switch, LDIFDE should dump all the attributes, but it does not seem to be doing that. If I compare the LDIFDE dump to the attributes of the same object using ADSIEdit, I see a lot of other attributes that don’t show-up in the LDIFDE dump. If I use the –L switch with LDIFDE and specify one of the attributes the originally did not show-up in the dump, LDIFDE dumps it just fine. Can you guys know why LDIFDE will not dump all the attributes of an object?

Oops Department, Exchange, Clustering, SQL, Windows Security, LCS, Misc.

Windows Server Clustering — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 23:25:22 GMT