Accidentally renamed a user to a blank space

  • Thread starter Thread starter dominictiberio
  • Start date Start date
D

dominictiberio

Hey all,

Here's a hopefully easy one. The other day when trying to search for a
user in AD apparently it had registered a double click and was in
rename mode. Before I could realize it the username had been cleared
out and I had already clicked away. So now we have a user that has lost
it's name. I thought I would easily be able to sort and it would jump
to the top or bottom of the list and I could rename it back... however
it doesn't even appear in the list.

Veritas also game me an error last night stating it could not backup
the mailbox directory "%s" which I am assuming is this account. How can
I find and fix this account?

Thanks to any and all.
 
So now we have a user that has lost
it's name. I thought I would easily be able to sort and it would jump
to the top or bottom of the list and I could rename it back... however
it doesn't even appear in the list.
Click to expand...

Can you find it in Active Directory Users & Computers by searching the
OU or domain for users called "* *"? (without the quotation marks).

Adam.
 
Hey all,

Here's a hopefully easy one. The other day when trying to search for a
user in AD apparently it had registered a double click and was in
rename mode. Before I could realize it the username had been cleared
out and I had already clicked away. So now we have a user that has lost
it's name. I thought I would easily be able to sort and it would jump
to the top or bottom of the list and I could rename it back... however
it doesn't even appear in the list.

Veritas also game me an error last night stating it could not backup
the mailbox directory "%s" which I am assuming is this account. How can
I find and fix this account?

Thanks to any and all.
Click to expand...

Hi,

I would try to filter in ADUC (View, Filter options, Create custom filter,
Customize, Advanced), perhaps with the LDAP query on the Common Name
attribute:

(cn=" ")

However, when I attempted to rename a user object to cn = " ", the system
did not allow it. I can't find documentation on it, but I think I recall
there are restrictions on the first character for cn. Most likely your cn is
one character, and you don't know which character. I don't know of any quick
query for this. Letter, numbers, and some symbols are allowed.
 
Richard said:
Hi,

I would try to filter in ADUC (View, Filter options, Create custom filter,
Customize, Advanced), perhaps with the LDAP query on the Common Name
attribute:

(cn=" ")

However, when I attempted to rename a user object to cn = " ", the system
did not allow it. I can't find documentation on it, but I think I recall
there are restrictions on the first character for cn. Most likely your cn is
one character, and you don't know which character. I don't know of any quick
query for this. Letter, numbers, and some symbols are allowed.
Click to expand...

Thanks Rich,

Yes, I also believed that it would not allow a blank space only. I did
a scan through AD and did not find any single character names, so I
think AD may have either repaired itself or some such. I am going to
wait until tonight to see if Veritas backs up cleanly or still errors
on this %s user mailbox.

Thanks for the help!
 
This isn't possible, AD would truncate the space off the end of the
string which would mean it would be set to a null value which isn't
allowed. While it may have been renamed, it couldn't be renamed to a
space value. The closest I expect you could get would be to rename it to
"\ ".

So anyway, if you know the account's samaccountname, you could do a
search on that value and see the current cn.

joe

--
Joe Richards Microsoft MVP Windows Server Directory Services
Author of O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition
www.joeware.net


---O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition now available---

http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm
 
Joe said:
This isn't possible, AD would truncate the space off the end of the
string which would mean it would be set to a null value which isn't
allowed. While it may have been renamed, it couldn't be renamed to a
space value. The closest I expect you could get would be to rename it to
"\ ".

So anyway, if you know the account's samaccountname, you could do a
search on that value and see the current cn.

joe

--
Joe Richards Microsoft MVP Windows Server Directory Services
Author of O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition
www.joeware.net


---O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition now available---

http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm
Click to expand...

I would have thought exactly the same Joe, but as I stated even Veritas
errored out and referred to the mailbox as "%s" so I tend to believe
that it did allow it to be named a blank, a space, or a null value of
some sort. It appears that the change reverted back at the next
replication though because no users are missing or renamed improperly
and Veritas backed up fine the next night. The other strange thing was
that I got no error from windows when I clicked out from the rename and
it most certainly was blank.

Everything is fine now, but that one had me stumped and was totally
against what I would have thought would happen too.
 
I would expect a bug in veritas before I would expect a null name or
space name to get through, I have been through that section of the
source code several times.

--
Joe Richards Microsoft MVP Windows Server Directory Services
Author of O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition
www.joeware.net


---O'Reilly Active Directory Third Edition now available---

http://www.joeware.net/win/ad3e.htm
 
Hey all,

Here's a hopefully easy one. The other day when trying to search for a
user in AD apparently it had registered a double click and was in
rename mode. Before I could realize it the username had been cleared
out and I had already clicked away. So now we have a user that has lost
it's name. I thought I would easily be able to sort and it would jump
to the top or bottom of the list and I could rename it back... however
it doesn't even appear in the list.

Veritas also game me an error last night stating it could not backup
the mailbox directory "%s" which I am assuming is this account. How can
I find and fix this account?

Thanks to any and all.
Click to expand...

Hi,

Couldn't he just do an ldifde to export the contents of the AD to see
the users, and then do an ldifde import to fix it?

Jim
 
Check out this solution:

http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/activeadmin/

Active Administrator by ScriptLogic will automatically backup AD
objects and allow you to easily revert to a previos setting without
rebuilding the user account or having to go into authoritative restore
mode to recover the previous setting. Even if the object is deleted,
it will fully restore all settings, security, attributes and passwords.
If you mistakenly delete an OU, it will maintain group memberships and
all configured settings.
 
Back
Top