Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

find

Synopsis

Find users, contacts, groups, computers, printers, shared folders, or organizational units in Active Directory, or perform a custom search of Active Directory.

Procedures

This procedure illustrates how an administrator can search Active Directory for a specific object or attribute (ordinary users search Active Directory differently by using Start → Search instead):

1. Open the Active Directory Users and Computers console, and select a domain or organizational unit (OU) from which to begin your search. If you select Entire Directory, then the entire global catalog is searched using your query.

2. Use Action → Find to open the Find Users, Contacts, and Groups dialog box.

3. Specify what type of objects to find:

   Users, Contacts, and Groups

   Computers

   Printers

   Shared Folders

   Organizational Units

   Custom search

4. Broaden the starting point for your search by selecting:

   Entire directory

   Local domain or any parent domain in the domain tree

   The OU selected above

5. Formulate a search query using any or all of the available tabs:

   • The first tab allows you to formulate simple queries using basic attributes for the type of object specified, such as a user’s name, the role of a computer, the location of a printer, and so on.

   • The Features tab (printers only) provides additional search attributes.

   • The Advanced tab lets you search using pattern-matching on any combination of attributes for the selected type of directory object. Specify a field (attribute) to search on, a condition, and a value to search for. ...