I have an Active Directory with about 900 users. The vast majority
(all but about 15) have a single mandatory roaming profile. Because of
some inconsistencies in the creation of user accounts over the years, how
the profile location is specified in an account varies. Some accounts
have "\\servername\profiles\normal\" some have
"%logonserver%\profiles\normal". I needed to standardize these to
"\\newservername\profiles\normal\".
The easy way would be with the graphical tools. Select multiple
users in Active Directory Users and Computers, right click, and select
Properties.
With this form it is relatively trivial to change a huge number of
accounts. While I changed nearly the profile path listing to
"\\newservername\profiles\normal\", I changed some (those accounts that
have their own profiles) to "\\newservername\profiles\%username%". There
are a variety of other environment variables available.
The hard way would use the
Directory Service command-line tools from Microsoft that were included
with Windows 2003 Server. They are quite powerful tools that allow you to
query, modify, add, or whatnot.
The command I ended up with, after a great deal of experimentation
(most of it was simply getting comfortable with the tools and toying
with examples provided in Microsoft's documentation), was
dsget group "CN=groupname,DC=ads,DC=example,DC=com"
-members -expand
| dsmod user -profile "\\servername\profiles\normal"
the dsget command returns one per line a list of users that belong to
the group "groupname". dsmod takes that output and changes the profile
setting.
Other interesting examples of the DS tools.
This will get you a list of all members (recursively expanded if you
have nested groups) of group groupname.
dsget group "CN=groupname,DC=ads,DC=example,DC=com" -members -expand
To create a new user
dsadd user "cn=username,DC=ads,DC=example,DC=com"
Much of my experimentation with the DS tools was done with thoughts of
finally scripting account creation floating through my head. Let me just
slide this into a slot near the top of to do list.
