This applies to network accounts which authenticate against Active Directory and do not have a mobile account.

Why my place of work used to setup Macs with the option for create mobile account at login turned off is a mystery to me.

Under Win32 platforms, file times are maintained primarily in the form of a 64-bit FILETIME structure, which represents the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since January 1, 1601 UTC (coordinate universal time).

It just so happens that Microsoft Active Directory uses the same 64-bit value to store some time values. For example the accountExpires attribute is in this format. Linked below is a module for Python with utility functions for converting between Python’s datetime instances and Microsoft’s FILETIME values.

Very handy if you enjoy querying Active Directory for login accounts that are due to expire. And who wouldn’t enjoy that? On a Monday.

Download filetimes.py module for converting between FILETIME and datetime objects. This code is released under a 2-clause BSD license.

Example usage:

>>> from filetimes import filetime_to_dt, dt_to_filetime, utc
>>> filetime_to_dt(116444736000000000)
datetime.datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0)
>>> filetime_to_dt(128930364000000000)
datetime.datetime(2009, 7, 25, 23, 0)
>>> "%.0f" % dt_to_filetime(datetime(2009, 7, 25, 23, 0))
'128930364000000000'
>>> dt_to_filetime(datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, tzinfo=utc))
116444736000000000L
>>> dt_to_filetime(datetime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0))
116444736000000000L

I even remembered to write tests for once!