Q&A: How can I check which users have been created since a certain date?

[Grandjean]

Question

How can I check which users have been created since a certain date?

Answer

You can use the + option when using univention-ldapsearch to get some meta information about the objects in LDAP, e.g. univention-ldapsearch uid=mary + . Those include e.g. the creatorsName and createTimestamp. Those meta information attributes can also be queried directly:

univention-ldapsearch -LLL '(&(uid=*)(objectClass=inetOrgPerson)(createTimestamp>=20200916070000Z))' uid createTimestamp

This should find all users that were created on 2020-09-16 07:00:00 UTC or later and give you the username (uid) and the actual create timestamp.

Let’s break this down:

• univention-ldapsearch is the regular CLI tool on UCS to query the OpenLDAP directly
• -LLL will reduce the meta information in the output and just give you the results
• '(&(uid=*)(objectClass=inetOrgPerson)(createTimestamp>=20200916070000Z))' is the LDAP filter:
  • uid=* -> every object that has any value in the attribute uid (uid = username)
  • objectClass=inetOrgPerson -> anything that is considered a person or a user. Might include system users such as join-backup, though.
  • createTimestamp>=20200916070000Z -> every object that has a create timestamp equal to or bigger than 2020-09-16 on 07:00am in UTC. The Z stands for Zulu time, which is the same as GMT/UTC.
  • (&(...)(...)(...)) -> this is an AND operation for the LDAP filter (indicated by the “&”), so ALL three statements in the inner brackets must be true.
  • uid createTimestamp -> this just tells the ldapsearch to return only the attributes uid and createTimestamp. If you don’t specify any attribute here, ldapsearch will return the whole object with all attributes.