in PowerShell

Creating demo users in Active Directory

Posted on by Øyvind Kallstad

For a task at work I had to create a number of users in Active Directory for a demo environment I had to set up. I didn’t really want to do this manually, and I wanted something more realistic than ‘DemoUser 01’, ‘DemoUser 02’ and so on.

I found an online API to generate random, but realistic user data, and decided to create a wrapper function to quickly get user data.

I then created a simple script to use this data to create demo users in Active Directory. I thought this might be of interest to others, so decided to share it here on my blog.

The code could probably be more polished, but as this was for a demo environment I decided that this would be enough. If you take my code and improve on it, please let me know! 🙂

First the wrapper function to get user data from randomuser.me.

function Get-RandomUser {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
Generate random user data.
.DESCRIPTION
This function uses the free API for generating random user data from https://randomuser.me/
.EXAMPLE
Get-RandomUser 10
.EXAMPLE
Get-RandomUser -Amount 25 -Nationality us,gb -Format csv -ExludeFields picture
.LINK
https://randomuser.me/
.NOTES
Author: Øyvind Kallstad
Date: 08.04.2016
Version: 1.0
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
param (
[Parameter(Position = 0)]
[ValidateRange(1,5000)]
[int] $Amount,
[Parameter()]
[ValidateSet('Male','Female')]
[string] $Gender,
# Supported nationalities: AU, BR, CA, CH, DE, DK, ES, FI, FR, GB, IE, IR, NL, NZ, TR, US
# Pictures won't be affected by this, but data such as location, cell/home phone, id, etc. will be more appropriate.
[Parameter()]
[string[]] $Nationality,
# Seeds allow you to always generate the same set of users.
[Parameter()]
[int] $Seed,
[Parameter()]
[ValidateSet('json','csv','yaml','xml')]
[string] $Format = 'json',
# Fields to include in the results.
# Supported values: gender, name, location, email, login, registered, dob, phone, cell, id, picture, nat
[Parameter()]
[string[]] $IncludeFields,
# Fields to exclude from the the results.
# Supported values: gender, name, location, email, login, registered, dob, phone, cell, id, picture, nat
[Parameter()]
[string[]] $ExcludeFields
)
$rootUrl = "http://api.randomuser.me/?format=$($Format)&quot;
if ($Amount) {
$rootUrl += "&results=$($Amount)"
}
if ($Gender) {
$rootUrl += "&gender=$($Gender)"
}
if ($Seed) {
$rootUrl += "&seed=$($Seed)"
}
if ($Nationality) {
$rootUrl += "&nat=$($Nationality -join ',')"
}
if ($IncludeFields) {
$rootUrl += "&inc=$($IncludeFields -join ',')"
}
if ($ExcludeFields) {
$rootUrl += "&exc=$($ExcludeFields -join ',')"
}
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $rootUrl
}
view raw Get-RandomUser.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

This is the code that I used to create the demo users.

$adPath = 'OU=Users,OU=Dev,DC=test,DC=local'
$adDomain = 'test.local'
$userPassword = 'aV3ryl0ng-and.securePASSWORD!!'
$users = Get-RandomUser -Amount 30 -Nationality gb,uk -ExcludeFields picture | Select-Object -ExpandProperty results
foreach ($user in $users) {
$newUserProperties = @{
Name = "$($user.name.first) $($user.name.last)"
GivenName = $user.name.first
Surname = $user.name.last
Path = $adPath
AccountPassword = (ConvertTo-SecureString $userPassword -AsPlainText -Force)
SamAccountName = $user.login.username
UserPrincipalName = "$($user.login.username)@$($adDomain)"
Enabled = $true
}
try {New-ADUser @newUserProperties} catch {}
}
view raw createAdUsers.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Unfortunately the password returned with the API is not always strong enough for Active Directory, so I decided to hard code it. These are demo users so having the same password for all users isn’t an issue.

I hope this have been helpful. Please leave any comments below.

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