Get-AdUser and city

Question

Hello,

We needed to set the city for our users and noticed that the -l can be used as a alias for -city.

For example if you run

get-aduser User.Name -Properties l,logonworkstations

The city will be displayed.

So last week changed city for all our users using the -l alias, shortly after we had a call where we found users users couldn't log on.

After checking their AD account we noticed their LogonWorkStations had been set with their city.

We quickly reversed our change but noticed that if you use:

get-aduser User.Name | set-aduser -l "NEW SITE" 

Then "LogonWorkstations" will be set with "New Site"

What on earth is happening? Is -l different for Ge-Aduser and set-Aduser??

Is this just our domain?

Answer 1

Thanks Ian, I'm unable to see where -l for logonworkstations is documented.

To me this seems like a mistake? So l is used for different things for get and set?

Answer 2

Hi,

The "-l" parameter is short for "-LogonWorkstations" in Set-ADUser and "-LDAPFilter" in Get-ADUser . To change the "l" attribute you should use the "-City" parameter. The "l" in Get-ADUser $username -Properties l,logonworkstations is the value accepted by the "-Properties" parameter.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedirectory/get-aduser
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/activedirectory/set-aduser

Best Regards,
Ian Xue

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Answer 3

Maybe this helps:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12037.active-directory-get-aduser-default-and-extended-properties.aspx

City is the Get-ADuser property and l is the equivalent LDAP DisplayName/Attribute

The LDAP attribute l is defined in RFC2256 - 5.8
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2256#section-5.8

I wasn't able to find -l as the short/alias for -LogonWorkStations related to the Set-ADUser as well.

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten