Script to check hostname and move to appropriate OU

Question

Is it possible to create a "universal" script that checks the first three alphabets of a hostname and moves the host into the appropriate OU?

E.g. A hostname that begins with TKYxxxxx is a host in Tokyo and when the script detects TKY, it would move this host to the Tokyo site OU.

Would it be possible/recommended to take it a step further and launch this script as part of a login script which checks AD if the hostname exists in AD, and if not, check the hostname and move it to the appropriate site OU. If no matches, leave it in the Computers OU.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The following will do the job but be careful and test 1st to understand how it works!

dsquery computer -name tky* | dsmove -newparent "ou=tokyo,dc=x,dc=com"

Answer 2

By "universal", I would say that if your convention is well defined, and know the appropriate LDAP paths, then It is very possible to do this, but you are really going to want to write this script yourself (or have somebody do it for you.) All that you need to do is iterate over your computer objects (usually a "for each" or a "do while" loop), and either do an "if...elseif...else" or a case (or switch) construct to do the magic.

Tip: I usually reserve the "else" (or the default clause of a case statement) as a "WTF" catchall. This is for machines that don't meet the naming convention and alert you. Either print the statement out to the console, write to a logfile (always good practice to log everything), or send an email of all WTF-s.

Tip: When looking just for Windows Servers, I parse the Object.operatingSystem property for the pattern "WindowsServer". This pattern matches the text of every Windows Server version.

I know how to do this best in VBScript and Perl, but it's very possible in Powershell, JavaScript, Python. Anything that can hook into AD/LDAP, really...

Check out the Microsoft Technet Script Center Repository. You may find something that does close to what you need.