How can I work with Active Directory from Perl?

Question

I am considering writing some Perl scripts that interact with Active Directory. Being somewhat new to Perl, I was wondering if there were any specific modules, tools, techniques, etc. that anyone would suggest I use. As of right now, I am only looking to pull user information to process with the script.

Answer 1

From what I understand, there are two options:

• Win32::OLE module
• Execute external tools (suchs DSQuery, DSGet, etc) and parse the output.

I don't have much experience with Win32::Ole, may be someone else can elaborate on that a bit.

Answer 2

The best source of Active Directory example code in Perl is available here. It's from Robbie Allen, the co-author of O'Reilly's excellent Active Directory Cookbook.

Here is an example from their cookbook code:

# This Perl code finds all disabled user accounts in a domain.

# ---------------------------------------------------------------
# Adapted from VBScript code contained in the book:
#      "Active Directory Cookbook" by Robbie Allen
# ISBN: 0-596-00466-4
# ---------------------------------------------------------------

# ------ SCRIPT CONFIGURATION ------
my $strDomainDN = "<DomainDN>";    # e.g. dc=rallencorp,dc=com
# ------ END CONFIGURATION ---------
use Win32::OLE;
$Win32::OLE::Warn = 3;
my $strBase   =  "<LDAP://" . $strDomainDN . ">;";
my $strFilter = "(&(objectclass=user)(objectcategory=person)" . 
                "(useraccountcontrol:1.2.840.113556.1.4.803:=2));";
my $strAttrs  = "name;";
my $strScope  = "subtree";

my $objConn = Win32::OLE->CreateObject("ADODB.Connection");
$objConn->{Provider} = "ADsDSOObject";
$objConn->Open;
my $objRS = $objConn->Execute($strBase . $strFilter . $strAttrs . $strScope);
$objRS->MoveFirst;
while (not $objRS->EOF) {
    print $objRS->Fields(0)->Value,"\n";
    $objRS->MoveNext;
}