Renaming OU name can exceed the OU max length

Question

Hi,

I've encountered a weird scenario which I am not sure how is it possible.
After creating an OU, you can actually change the name of the OU to be a name with 132 characters, even though the limit for OU name length is 64 characters. how it that possible?

Answer 1

Hi @Guy Franco

There are multiple attributes used to name an object in AD, as you can see from below, they have different maximum lengths. When you create an OU object in ADUC, the maximum length of the name is based on the max OU length - 3 characters, to accommodate the rDNAttID i.e. 'ou='. However, once the object is created, you can rename the OU in ADUC, and you can exceed the 64 character limit and the name can be up to 256 characters - 3 characters.

Once you exceed the max length for the OU, the OU attribute will be truncated to its maximum length, which can cause duplicate name issues.

Gary.