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Batch User Creation - Introduction

Batch User Creation HOW-TO -- Introduction

About This Document

This document is a step-by-step guide to creating multiple domain user accounts on a Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 network. It is based in large part on an article originally at www.winnetmag.com. The steps outlined in that article have been tailored to fit CPS school networks.

This how-to is intended to be useable by any TechCo with at least some familiarity with Excel. It will be helpful, but not necessary, to be familiar with the DOS command line. As we go along, I will explicitly describe the things to do at each step, and then offer explanation for those who want to learn more or need clarification.

This how-to uses the following conventions to help you follow the text:

Text like this is general information: instructions, explanations, advice.

Text like this is explicit code; you should type text that looks like this exactly as you see it.

Text like this is a warning or very important piece of information; reading this carefully will (hopefully) save you potential grief further along.

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A Little More

To explain a little more fully: WinNT and Win2K make it very easy to create and manage individual user accounts with the Domain User Management tool and Active Directory Manager, respectively. However, creating accounts for 300+ users one-by-one would be a ridiculously long, not to mention boring, process. Luckily, there are command-line tools that do everything we would normally do from the GUI. This means we can create a batch file to do each step for each new user, thus saving us a lot of time.

We will be using Microsoft Excel to create these batches. In Excel, we will start with a file that contains all the information we need for each student in the school, and using formulas, get Excel to speak DOS's language. An important thing to keep in mind throughout is that Excel and DOS don't know a single thing about each other. You could say that we're going to be "tricking" Excel into speaking proper DOS. The formulas we use will be written in Excel's language, but they will produce batches in DOS's lanuage.

When you're finished, each student in you school will have their own account on the network, a folder on the server that they can save all their work into, and a login script that will make that folder available any time they login to a computer on the school's network. This means that each student's files are all in the a single place that makes it easier for you to manage them, and let's you reformat any computer for maintenance without worrying about losing the files that students have saved on it. The steps outlined here are explicitly for creating student accounts. However, once you done this once, it should be a simple matter to convert the process for creating teacher and staff accounts.

A Brief Outline

Before You Start: This section gets together everything you need to start working.
Batch User Creation - ADDUSERS: This section walks you through the process of creating a file that the program addusers.exe will understand and use to create the basic login account for each student.
Batch User Creation - MD: This section describes the process of creating a folder on the server for each user's work by making a batch file the runs md.exe.
Batch User Creation - CACLS: This section will walk you through the process of setting all the security permissions on the folders you've created with cacls.exe.
Batch User Creation - RMTSHARE: rmtshare.exe lets you create network shares so that the students will be able to access their home directories from anywhere on the network.
Batch User Creation - Login Script: The last section of this HOWTO will setup a script that lives on the server and makes sure that each user's home directory is automatically mounted when a user logs on.

If you have any questions about the process, or you run into problems, or you find an error in this HOWTO, please feel free to email the authors at %author;

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This page is: http://tech.cuip.net/topics/logins/intro.html
Author: Ben Buckley, benb@cuip.net
Last updated at 09:11 2005n June 17, 2005.
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