I'm trying to find the Base DN of the user that can access or controls all the users in Active Directory so I can put it in my LDAP.
Usually someone will give me this, and it looks like DC=domain,DC=company,DC=com
But the admin is not available, so I don't know how to find this in Active Directory.
I'm looking for a step by step to find this info. Which tree and tabs to open and how to construct it.
My user is: admin, the server is: controller-16.domain.company.com
But I don't know if they added OU or groups or something else
I know that this:
CN=admin,DC=domain,DC=company,DC=com
does not work. Nor does:
DC=domain,DC=company,DC=com
If the Base DN works on Gawor's LDAP Browser, then it will work for my LDAP.
You could try my Beavertail ADSI browser - it should show you the current AD tree, and from it, you should be able to figure out the path and all.
![](https://www.manongdao.com/static/images/pcload.jpg)
Or if you're on .NET 3.5, using the System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement
namespace, you could also do it programmatically:
PrincipalContext ctx = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain);
This would create a basic, default domain context and you should be able to peek at its properties and find a lot of stuff from it.
Or:
UserPrincipal myself = UserPrincipal.Current;
This will give you a UserPrincipal
object for yourself, again, with a ton of properties to inspect. I'm not 100% sure what you're looking for - but you most likely will be able to find it on the context or the user principal somewhere!
Most common AD default design is to have a container, cn=users just after the root of the domain. Thus a DN might be:
cn=admin,cn=users,DC=domain,DC=company,DC=com
Also, you might have sufficient rights in an LDAP bind to connect anonymously, and query for (cn=admin)
. If so, you should get the full DN back in that query.
CN refers to class name, so put in your LDAP query CN=Users. Should work.