What are CN, OU, DC in an LDAP search?

Question

I have a search query in LDAP like this. What exactly does this query mean?

(\"CN=Dev-India,OU=Distribution Groups,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com\");
         


        

Answer 1

What are CN, OU, DC?

From RFC2253 (UTF-8 String Representation of Distinguished Names):

String  X.500 AttributeType
------------------------------
CN      commonName
L       localityName
ST      stateOrProvinceName
O       organizationName
OU      organizationalUnitName
C       countryName
STREET  streetAddress
DC      domainComponent
UID     userid

What does the string from that query mean?

The string ("CN=Dev-India,OU=Distribution Groups,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com") is a path from an hierarchical structure (DIT = Directory Information Tree) and should be read from right (root) to left (leaf).

It is a DN (Distinguished Name) (a series of comma-separated key/value pairs used to identify entries uniquely in the directory hierarchy). The DN is actually the entry's fully qualified name.

Here you can see an example where I added some more possible entries.
The actual path is represented using green.

The following paths represent DNs (and their value depends on what you want to get after the query is run):

• "DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com"
• "OU=Distribution Groups,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com"
• "OU=People,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com"
• "OU=Groups,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com"
• "CN=QA-Romania,OU=Distribution Groups,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com"
• "CN=Dev-India,OU=Distribution Groups,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com"
• "CN=Diana Anton,OU=People,DC=gp,DC=gl,DC=google,DC=com"