Can I get the members of Domain Users group (AD specific) with JNDI?

Question

Hi All,
I've found these forums very helpful and full of great information, I've been able to retrieve all members of groups that I search for (from the information on this forum), and get the member's attributes such as email addresses through that.
The question I have is, is there a way to query the Domain Users group, since it's a special group in Active Directory, and retrieve the members of it? So far I have been unsuccessful. Here's a query I found that works on .Net:
(|(&({ClassFilter})(memberOf={GroupDistinguishedName}))(distinguishedName={G
roupDistinguishedName}))
I haven't been able to get it to work with JNDI however. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
thanks,
Matt

Answer 1

It's not so much that the Domain Users is a special group, it's more that because by default, all users have their Primary Group set to Domain Users, that it appears to behave differently.
So the query that you're trying to execute via JNDI, would be something like:String searchFilter = "(&(objectClass=user)(memberOf=CN=Domain Users,CN=Users,DC=Antipodes,DC=Com))";And of course if everything has been left to defaults, it doesn't return any results.
Similarly if you look at the member attribute of Domain Users, it will be empty.
Assuming the defaults, and every user's Primary Group is set to Domain Users, the following query would return all the user's whose primary group is Domain Users:String searchFilter = "(&(objectClass=user)(PrimaryGroupID=513))";Note that 513 is the Relative ID (RID) for Domain Users.
Now if you set a user's Primary Group to be something other than Domain Users, then the Domain Users group would now have a value
for it's member attribute and conversely the respective user would now have Domain Users as one of the values of their memberOf attribute.
So then your query would be something like:
String searchFilter = "(&(objectClass=User)(|(memberOf=CN=Domain Users,CN=Users,DC=Antipodes,DC=Com)(PrimaryGroupID=513))){code}
I guess the fundamental question, is why do you need to determine whuch users are members of Domain Users ?
If this is for usie in an application, where the user has authenticated and you are using group membership to make authorisation decisions, perhaps the constructed tokenGroups attribute may be more useful  as it contains the Security Identifiers (SID) for all the groups the user is a member of ?