Seneej'S

How to find out inactive computers from Active Directory OU and clean them

Dsquery is a command-line tool that is built into Windows Server 2008 to find out the inactive computers or search criteria that you specify. Also we can use the dsmod and dsrm tool to disable or delete these objects at the same time.

There are two steps in this process and its explained below

Steps 1 –Find out inactive Computers from OU

Open elevated command prompt on DC and then type in

dsquery computer <distinguish name of the OU> –inactive <weeks> -limit <number> > c:computer.txt

Example

If you want to find out the 90 days inactive computers from specific OU

dsquery computer OU=TEST,DC=Ibsarabia,DC=com –inactive 12-limit500> c:computer.txt

–inactive 12: inactive in past 12 weeks (90 days)

-limit 500: limit the max entry to 500 in case there are too many objects

Steps 2 – Delete/Disable inactive computers

Pleases see below steps disable or delete these inactive objects after analyzing the computer.txt file.

To disable these objects:

type c:computer.txt | dsmod computer –disabled yes

To delete these objects:

type c:computer.txt | dsrm –noprompt -c

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