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Community Blog How to Find out Which Active Directory Groups You Are a Member Of

How to Find out Which Active Directory Groups You Are a Member Of

This article explains how to find out which Active Directory groups you are a member of.

By Kelvin Galabuzi

What Is Active Directory?

Active Directory is an organizational structure that stores information about objects on a computer network. The Active Directory service runs Windows Server Operating Systems and manages different objects on the domain, such as user accounts, computers, etc.

Active Directory Components

Active Directory is made up of the components defined below:

  • Schema: The Active Directory schema defines the structure of the objects in the domain. These are usually classes of objects and attributes of the objects.
  • Global Catalog: This service stores information about all objects in the domain. The service also allows users to log in to the domain by locating the required information from an Active Directory domain controller.
  • Replication Service: The Active Directory replication service transfers information about all objects across the network to different active directory domain controllers to ensure they are all in sync with the most up-to-date information.

Active Directory Security Groups

An everyday use case of Active Directory is to authenticate and authorize users on the network. For example, users on the Active Directory can be added to multiple security groups. When they authenticate to the domain, their access is limited to only the security groups they are a part of.

Active Directory has many security groups:

  • Universal: Universal groups contain accounts from any domain in the same Active Directory Forest or global groups from any domain in the same forest.
  • Global: Global groups contain accounts from the same domain and other global groups from the same domain.
  • Domain Local: Domain local groups contain accounts from any domain or any trusted domain, global groups from any domain or any trusted domain, universal groups from any domain in the same forest, other domain local groups from the same domain, and other global or universal groups from other forests.

Prerequisites

There are multiple ways to find out which Active Directory groups a user is a part of. Please follow the prerequisites below to begin:

  • We will use an Alibaba Cloud ECS Windows instance to complete this guide. If you don't have an Alibaba Cloud account, sign up for a Free Trial.
  • Ensure that you have added a Windows Client/Computer to the Active Directory Domain
  • Ensure that you have logged into the Windows 10 client with a valid domain user
  • Ensure that you have an Active Directory Domain Services server with security groups memberships added to Users

Methods

Method 1

Log in to the Windows Client Computer with the user you want to validate, open an elevated Powershell command line, and run the gpresult /R command:

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When you scroll down to the User Settings after typing and running the command, you should be able to see all the groups the user is a part of:

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Method 2

Log in to the Windows Client Computer with the user you want to validate, open an elevated Powershell command line, and run the whoami /groups command:

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Method 3

Log in to the Active Directory Domain Services domain controller, open an elevated Powershell command line, and run the Get-ADPrincipalGroupMembership command with the target user specified after the command:

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