How do I find out which computer is the domain controller in Windows programmatically?

windows networking
Dorky Engineer picture Dorky Engineer · Dec 9, 2008 · Viewed 233.8k times · Source

I am looking for a way to determine what the Name/IP Address of the domain controller is for a given domain that a client computer is connected to.

At our company we have a lot of small little networks that we use for testing and most of them have their own little domains. As an example, one of the domains is named "TESTLAB". I have an Windows XP workstation that is a member of the TESTLAB domain and I am trying to figure out the name of the domain controller so that I can go and look to see what users have been defined for the domain. In our lab there is a mix of Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003 (and in reality probably a couple of NT 4 Servers) so it would be nice to find a solution that would work for both.

Looking on the Internet, it looks like there are various utilities, such as Windows Power Shell or nltest, but these all require that you download and install other utilities. I was hoping to find a way to find the domain controller without having to install anything additional.

EDIT If I wanted to write a program to find the domain controller or the users in the current domain, how would I go about doing that?

Answer

MZywitza picture MZywitza · Dec 9, 2008

With the most simple programming language: DOS batch

echo %LOGONSERVER%

Related questions

How can you find out which process is listening on a port on Windows?

How can you find out which process is listening on a port on Windows?

Read More
Command line for looking at specific port

Is there a way to examine the status of a specific port from the Windows command line? I know I can use netstat to examine all ports but netstat is slow and looking at a specific port probably isn't.

Read More
Bridged networking not working in Virtualbox under Windows 10

I just upgraded my laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and found that I am unable to start Virtualbox VMs configured with a bridged adapter. See the configuration below:

Read More