Powershell & DFS Namespace Management

[woreilly]

I am in the midst of developing a Powershell script from an original I found on the web to cater to my colleagues needs. We currently use a VBS script developed by some colleagues who no longer work with us in conjunction with a spreadsheet of users. I am looking to reduce the amount of information required in this spreadsheet and ultimately reduce the preparation time required for it. In a lot of schools, we have started implementing DFS Namespaces instead of pointing directly to folders on a server. I am wondering if there is any way currently (I know it's going to be featured in Powershell on the new version of Windows Server) of retrieving a DFS namespace so that the script can generate the path for user's profile and home folder itself?

 

The original script adds the user and moves it to the relevant OU. My additions include actually creating the user's home and profile folders and applied permissions. My next step is to reduce the total time from obtaining the list of new users to them being fully uploaded to AD which is where my thinking of generating paths automatically came from.

 

I have tested what I have done so far on Server 2008R2 and 2012 and 2012R2 and it's good so far. I'd appreciate any ideas or if you need anymore info from me let me know!

 

NOTE: I am a complete newbie to powershell and I appreciate there may already be scripts out there that can do what I want, I learn better by doing it myself then trying to decipher someone else's code

[halbaradkenafin]

I don't think there is currently anything to directly query the DFS namespace, I'd imagine it's available as a property of something else though. I don't have DFS set up here to play around with and try things out (should really fire up a test environment that I can just enable and disable this sort of thing with), if it's not getting native support till PS v5 then you might be out of luck for an easy solution. The next easiest solution though would be to have it as a parameter to your user creation script or specified in the csv file.

[Geoff]

Microsoft are addressing this short coming in W2k16 Server.

 

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj884270.aspx

 

However in the mean time there is this third party Powershell module you can use:

 

https://dfscommands.codeplex.com/

 

If that is not sufficent you will have to look at the VBS Script and see what WMI objects it's using. You can interact with WMI objects in Powershell too.