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Creating local profiles for all AD users



Author
9 Nov 2007 1:03 PM
Bartosz Kowalski
Hello,

When I login to PC as AD user, local profile (ie. folder tree in Documents
and Settings) is created. Is it possible to do it by script?

I need to do it for every user and computer in our AD

Author
9 Nov 2007 7:08 PM
Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]
Bartosz Kowalski <BartoszKowal***@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> When I login to PC as AD user, local profile (ie. folder tree in
> Documents and Settings) is created. Is it possible to do it by script?
>
> I need to do it for every user and computer in our AD

Can you please clarify what it is you're trying to do, and why?
Author
12 Nov 2007 6:36 AM
Bartosz Kowalski
Sometimes our PCs are working outside of AD with different users.
I want to make it possible for every user to work on a PC without AD
connection.
While logging on specific PC for the first time you need to have AD
connection, otherwise you receive a "user doesn't exist" message.

I want to make a script to "add" each AD users to PC.

I hope you understand what I need.

Show quote
"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]" wrote:

> Bartosz Kowalski <BartoszKowal***@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > When I login to PC as AD user, local profile (ie. folder tree in
> > Documents and Settings) is created. Is it possible to do it by script?
> >
> > I need to do it for every user and computer in our AD
>
> Can you please clarify what it is you're trying to do, and why?
>
>
>
Author
12 Nov 2007 1:12 PM
Steve Foster [SBS MVP]
Bartosz Kowalski wrote:

>Sometimes our PCs are working outside of AD with different users.
>I want to make it possible for every user to work on a PC without AD
>connection.
>While logging on specific PC for the first time you need to have AD
>connection, otherwise you receive a "user doesn't exist" message.
>
>I want to make a script to "add" each AD users to PC.
>
>I hope you understand what I need.

Creating a profile directory will not achieve this goal, as that doesn't
equate to having logged on at the PC.

There may be an API to create the logon profiles, but I suspect the
quickest way would simply be to logon to the PC using each AD account (if
you have access to the necessary passwords). RunAs offers the mechanism to
execute a command under different credentials and would be enough to cause
a profile to be instantiated.

Frankly, I'd say it's really not worth it. All you'll land up doing is
chewing up a lot of client PC disk space for no good reason. And, if you
enforce regular password changes (as you should), the profiles are going
to be inaccessible remotely anyway, since they'll have outdated password
hashes stored against them (ie the user would need to know their password
as it was at the time the profile was last accessed!).

It'd be easier to educate the users that if they want to use a machine
off-network, they must logon to it on-network first.

--
Steve Foster [SBS MVP]
---------------------------------------
MVPs do not work for Microsoft. Please reply only to the newsgroups.

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