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December 08, 2003

Rem: Finding and Disabling Inactive AD User Accounts


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We're running Windows 2000 Advanced Server with Service Pack 3 (SP3). Our corporate security policy mandates that we disable Active Directory (AD) user accounts after 31 days of inactivity. I want to write an Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) script that reads the value of each user's lastLogon attribute and disables the user account if that value exceeds 31 days. However, I've been unsuccessful. Can you provide some guidance?

Disabling stale user accounts by using the lastLogon attribute's value to measure staleness sounds easy enough, but unfortunately, it's not. Here's why: AD doesn't replicate the lastLogon attribute, which represents the last date and time a user was authenticated by a specific domain controller (DC). As a result, the lastLogon value will be different on each DC. To accurately determine the last date and time a user logged on, you would have to retrieve the lastLogon value from every DC in the domain, determine which of those values is the most recent, and compare that value with your inactivity threshold. . . .

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