Get the computer's security identifier (SID) remotely

We've been asked several times about getting the security identifier (SID) from remote machines on the network.

This is somewhat complex for people using scripting as the information is (annoyingly) not available using WMI unless you read the Win32_LocalAccounts class and string parse some of the SIDs from the user accounts.

This isn't ideal especially on a domain controller where the queries can be somewhat slow for this class.

We've therefore decided to add both the machine security identifier and the domain security identifier (the SID assigned to the computer by it's domain) to our server audit and documentation tool, and have used the low level Win32 APIs to obtain this information rather than using the less reliable string parsing method.





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