7.11 Getting Information About the Current User on Windows NT/2000

Credit: Wolfgang Strobl

7.11.1 Problem

You need information about the user who is currently logged into a Windows NT/2000 system, and the user may have domain validation rather than being a local-machine user.

7.11.2 Solution

If the user is validated on the domain rather than locally, it's not all that hard to get information from the domain controller:

import win32api, win32net, win32netcon
def UserGetInfo(user=None):
    if user is None: user=win32api.GetUserName(  )
    dc=win32net.NetServerEnum(None, 100, win32netcon.SV_TYPE_DOMAIN_CTRL)
    if dc[0]:  # We have a domain controller; query it
        dcname=dc[0][0]['name']
        return win32net.NetUserGetInfo("\\\\"+dcname, user, 1)
    else:      # No domain controller; try getting info locally
        return win32net.NetUserGetInfo(None, user, 1)

if _ _name_ _=="_ _main_ _":
    print UserGetInfo(  )

7.11.3 Discussion

The following call:

win32net.NetUserGetInfo(None, win32api.GetUserName(  ), 1)

works only for users logged into the local machine but fails for domain users. This recipe shows how to find the domain controller (if it exists) and query it about the user.

Obviously, this recipe works only on Windows NT/2000. In addition, it needs Mark Hammond's Win32 extensions, which goes almost without saying, since you can hardly do effective system-administration work with Python on Windows without those extensions (or a distribution that already includes them).

7.11.4 See Also

Documentation for win32api, win32net, and win32netcon in win32all (http://starship.python.net/crew/mhammond/win32/Downloads.html) or ActivePython (http://www.activestate.com/ActivePython/); Windows API documentation available from Microsoft (http://msdn.microsoft.com); Python Programming on Win32, by Mark Hammond and Andy Robinson (O'Reilly).