Creating random users for a domain

I needed to create some users for my Active Directory domain I created to use in the book “Windows PowerShell Bible” for the Exchange Management chapter.

I could have done something simple like:

001	1..120 | ForEach { Net User “BookUser$_” P@ssW0rd /ADD /Domain}

This would have created 120 users in the Users ou on my domain, but they would have all been “BookUser” users – where’s the variety in that?

I wanted random users, to more closely mimic a real domain. Searching for a random name generator led me to http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm. I chose to create 30 random names for both sexes, and ran the “Generate Random Names”

I copied the 30 resultant names to a notepad, and ran the page two more times, giving me 120 names.

Of those, a few were single names, which I eliminated.

I then replaced each space with a comma, saved the file as a .csv, and opened it in Excel.

Using Excel, I created a user name consisting of the first initial of the first name, and the whole last name.

I then added a 4th column, for the password.

Finally, I added column headers: First, Last, Login, and Password. Once again, I saved the file.

Now, I’m ready for PowerShell:

001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014

$bookOU = [ADSI]“LDAP://OU=Users,OU=Apps,DC=book,DC=local”  foreach ($user in import-csv users.csv) { $newUser = $bookOU.Create(“user”,“cn=” +$user.login) $newUser.put(“sn”, $user.Last) $newUser.put(“DisplayName”, $user.First + ” “ +$user.Last) $newUser.put(“givenName”, $user.First) $newUser.put(“sAMAccountName”,$user.login) $newUser.put(“userPrincipalName”,$user.login + “@book.com”) $newUser.SetInfo() $newUser.SetPassword($user.password) $newUser.put(“userAccountControl”, 512) $newUser.SetInfo() }

There you go… 14 lines, and a little work, and I have over 100 users on my domain.

Edited as I realized I needed the samaccountname and userprincipalname, and to follow Doug’s suggestion,

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