Domain and Active Directory Stuff
Bruce Sanderson's Domain and Active Directory Stuff
Security Principals (e.g. User Accounts) are known to Windows and Active Directory by their Security Identifier (SID
For example, in a folder permission list (Access Control List) the entries are designated by the SIDs of the users or groups. The Windows folder's Properties, Security dialog automatically determines the User or Group name associated with the SID and displays that.
Sometimes you need to know what the SID is for a particular User or Group, or you see the SID somewhere and need to know what User or Group this actually identifies.
Perhaps because I don't know how to search on the Internet very well, I could not find a program to do these translations. I did find references to some source code and some code snippets, but no executable (I did find some broken links!). So, I built one using Visual Studio 2008. You can download it via the link below.
This is "version 2" of this tool, which has an enhanced user interface. It also traps and reports most errors that might happen (e.g. no user name specified when Name to Sid is clicked; specified SID is not a SID).
As usual, you should be cautious downloading and running things from the Internet, but as far as I know, there is no malicious stuff in this executable. I make no guarantees etc., but it does seem to work correctly for me.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please post them in the microsoft.public.windows.server.general newsgroup - I browse this fairly regularly.
This application requires .Net Framework Version 3.
The code posted by Brent Gardner on his blog gave me the clues for building this simple application (see http://blogs.orcsweb.com/brent/archive/2007/04/20/net-sid2user-and-user2sid.aspx).
Last updated 14 December 2009*