I am scanning through my directory looking around just to see if there is something I don’t recognize or maybe something I didn’t previously understand that all of a sudden I magically do understand. Don’t laugh this happens on a fairly regular basis.
I pull up one of my new Vista machine account objects and start peeking at it and what do I see???? Low and behold Microsoft decided for the operatingSystem attribute that they should use the trademark SYMBOL!!!!
Yes the symbol —> â„¢ < ---... this ALWAYS works great at the command line.... trying to enter frelling special character symbols, what is the key sequence for that? Is there anyone over there paying attention to the command line and large scale management? Sure sure, I get it, the trademark symbol looks very cool in the listing IN THE GUI! What can I say? I am practically (heh) at a loss for words... Wankers. So in the GUI it looks like Windows Vistaâ„¢ Ultimate At the command line things look a bit different.... Here is how DSQUERY shows it Windows VistaT Ultimate AdFind shows it like Windows VistaÖ Ultimate I prefer how AdFind is showing it because at least I know it isn't a normal character so when my query I forumulate based on that value doesn't work I have a clue as to why. Neither tool can turn around and find the machines using the same string in a filter which it returns which is a strike against both of us (or maybe AD) but I admit openly AdFind doesn't do special characters well. Special characters (like Unicode) at the command line is a major pain in the ass. Maybe you are thinking, ah who cares joe? So we see some funny characters in the output occasionally at the command line, that isn't going to hurt right? Well no, that isn't going to hurt, but again think about what I said for the querying... Let's say I want to find all machines running Windows Vista Ultimate, not say Windows Vista MS Bob Edition. I have to formulate a query where operatingSystem looks like operatingsystem="Windows Vista* Ultimate" which is BAD. At least it is BAD when compared to operatingsystem="Windows Vista Ultimate" because medial wildcards suck for perf compared to an exact string.  Of course you have the option of also doing operatingsystem="Windows Vista*" and sorting out the MS Bob Editions yourself but do you really want to and what if you had 10,000 Bob editions? That is a lot of crap going over the wire that you don't need, that will be like getting basic data about Exchange 12 over the wire with Monad, Fat and Inefficient. The other option is to figure out how to enter a â„¢ when you enter the command and hope the tool being used can handle it. Great, now I have to figure out who to get this to before they go live with it with production bits. If you have any mechanisms available to you to feed this info back, I urge that you do. Â
