There are a lot of hints & tips out there for troubleshooting SPNs, or Service Principal Names. Listing duplicate SPNs is fairly easy, just use setspn -X
on your command-line and you’ll find out. But how do you find out which SPNs are used for which users and computers are used for this?
An SPN or Service Principal Name is a unique identity for a service, mapped with a specific account (mostly service account). Using an SPN, you can create multiple aliases for a service mapped with an Active Directory domain account.
SetSPN command-line
To set, list or delete the SPN, we use an in-built command line tool SETSPN (setspn.exe
) provided by Microsoft.
Quite some scripts assume you’re looking for a specific SPN (HTTP/…), a specific user, or a specific computer. For example, you can use setspn
to find (query) Service Principal Names (SPNs) linked to a certain computer:
setspn.exe -L <ServerName>
Code language: PowerShell (powershell)
Or you can use setspn
to find (query) SPNs linked to a certain user account:
setspn.exe -L <domain\user>
Code language: PowerShell (powershell)
And now you need a general script to list all SPNs, for all users and all computers…
You delete arbitrary SPNs, or Service Principal Names, using the -D
switch:
setspn.exe -D <spn> accountname
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)
List SPNs using Powershell
Nice to know fact, Service Principal Names (SPNs) are set as an attribute on the user or computer accounts. That makes it fairly ease to query for that attribute. And modern admins do PowerShell, right?
So… Save the following code into a new PowerShell .ps1
file and run it in your domain. It will query and list the Service Principal Names – SPNs.
# Source / credit:
# https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/18996.active-directory-powershell-script-to-list-all-spns-used.aspx
cls
$search = New-Object DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher([ADSI]"")
$search.filter = "(servicePrincipalName=*)"
## You can use this to filter for OU's:
## $results = $search.Findall() | ?{ $_.path -like '*OU=whatever,DC=whatever,DC=whatever*' }
$results = $search.Findall()
foreach( $result in $results ) {
$userEntry = $result.GetDirectoryEntry()
Write-host "Object Name = " $userEntry.name -backgroundcolor "yellow" -foregroundcolor "black"
Write-host "DN = " $userEntry.distinguishedName
Write-host "Object Cat. = " $userEntry.objectCategory
Write-host "servicePrincipalNames"
$i=1
foreach( $SPN in $userEntry.servicePrincipalName ) {
Write-host "SPN ${i} =$SPN"
$i+=1
}
Write-host ""
}
Code language: PowerShell (powershell)
Or use dsquery
on your CMD.exe command-line:
dsquery * "ou=domain controllers,dc=yourdomain,dc=com" -filter "(&(objectcategory=computer)
(servicePrincipalName=*))" -attr distinguishedName servicePrincipalName > spns.txt
Code language: PowerShell (powershell)
This is a valuable script and information reference for your own documentation.
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A few enhancement:
Great addition Philippe, thank you!
if the tusk is just to list all the SPNs in your domain, why just not simply:
Get-ADUser -filter * -prop * | where{$_.serviceprincipalname -ne $null} | select name, serviceprincipalname
?
Thank you for your addition Purclot, thank you. It’s always great to have multiple methods available. Or use
Get-ADComputer
.How can the above PowerShell script be modified to show just one server? I have tried different things but cannot get it to work.
Thanks
If using dsquery this filter will return user and computer objects
-filter “(&(|(objectcategory=computer)(objectcategory=user))(servicePrincipalName=*))”
Thanks for your addition FrankJ!
it is better to
setspn -Q */*
Thanks for your addition!
Update, a note to “John Doe’s”
-Q
addition: it seems like the-Q
query modifier is removed in Windows Server 2016 and up. It’s available in the help of my Windows Server 2012 R2 servers, but not in 2016:Hé this is a great way to list all SPN’s used in my active directory network, thanks!