Python Programming On Win32

User and Share Sample

We now present a fairly advanced sample of using some of these administrative tools in a real-world scenario.

The problem is that our company has just merged with another medium-sized company. The merger means 250 new user accounts need to be created on the network. This is clearly too many to perform manually when there is a tool such as Python available. It’s not a problem to get a text file with the names of the new users, but you need a way to automate the process. The requirements for creating the new users are to:

• Create a new NT user with a default password that must be changed at first logon.

• Create a home directory for the new user with the user information reflecting this as their home directory.

• Create a new share for the user’s home directory with the appropriate default permissions. Windows NT also supports connecting the user’s home directory to a drive letter, so you need to set the user info to nominate P: to connect to this share at logon.

Of course, this is still a contrived example. Any real-world job will have additional requirements when creating many new users; for example, creating an email account for each new user. In addition, the error-handling requirements depend on the particular task at hand. To this end, and to keep the size of the sample code down, no error handling exists at all. Notwithstanding these restrictions, you should still find the sample valuable when developing your own customized scripts.

Before jumping into the code, ...