Query AD & ND concurrently (Yep, you heard me right)

In our environment, we have Active Directory and Novell Directory Services. While I spend 95% of my time in AD, I do occasionally get asked to grab information from NDS. Instead of falling back on older tools, I thought I would look at querying NDS via PowerShell. After looking at a few .NET classes, I recalled that one of my handouts at a Central Ohio PowerShell Users Group meeting was NetCmdlets. These cmdlets greatly extend the features of Microsoft Windows PowerShell with a broad range of network management and messaging capabilities. They also happen to include Get-LDAP. Using this cmdlet, it is fairly straightforward to query NDS. Following is and example that queries AD and NDS in one line of script (broken up for readability.

Get-QADUser -Enabled -Department *92278*  Sort-Object samaccountname   `
ForEach-Object {  
    Get-LDAP -Server 'Novell-Server' -Search "cn=$($_.samaccountname)"  
}  Select-Object -Unique @{N="FullName";E={$_.FullName[0]}}, resultDN  `
Export-Csv -Path c:\temp\NDS.csv -NoTypeInformation

So here is what happens:

1. We query for enabled users in AD that are in Department 92278.
2. We sort these users by SAMAccountName
3. We iterate over each user calling Get-LDAP with an NDS server and the SAMAccountName as a parameter
4. We then select FullName and the resultDN (there is a bit of magic going on here as we need to assist PowerShell with the formatting: -Unique gets rid of blank lines (don't ask me why they are there). FullName actually returns an array (once again, not sure why), we can easily grab what we want by using by forcing the format @{N="FullName";E={$_.FullName[0]}}
5. Lastly, we kickout the results to a CSV ready for use in Excel

The results look like this...

FullName	resultDN
Alda, Alan	cn=Alda01,ou=IS,ou=OSU,ou=HOSP,ou=CAMPUS,o=OSU_MC
Burghoff, Gary	cn=Burg02,ou=IS,ou=OSU,ou=HOSP,ou=CAMPUS,o=OSU_MC
Farr, Jamie	cn=Farr01,ou=IS,ou=OSU,ou=HOSP,ou=CAMPUS,o=OSU_MC

At some point, I will look at using the System.DirectoryServices Namespace to accomplish this instead of relying on a 3rd party, but for now I can check a few immediate NDS related tasks off my list.

Enjoy!