Tag Archives: Microsoft AD Explorer

How to get the Organization Units (OU) and Hosts from Microsoft Active Directory using Python ldap3

I recently figured out how to work with Microsoft Active Directory using Python 3. I wanted to get a hierarchy of Organizational Units (OUs) and all the network hosts associated with these OUs to search for possible anomalies. If you are not familiar with AD, here is a good thread about the difference between AD Group and OU.

It seems much easier to solve such tasks using PowerShell. But it will probably require a Windows server. So I leave this for the worst scenario. 🙂 There is also a PowerShell Core, which should support Linux, but I haven’t tried it yet. If you want to use Python, there is a choice from the native python ldap3 module and Python-ldap, which is a wrapper for the OpenLDAP client. I didn’t find any interesting high-level functions in Python-ldap and finally decided to use ldap3.

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