Is it possible to use puppet to auto create user accounts in Active Directory? The idea being that puppet could regularly process a text file?
or is this really something much better handled outside of puppet using a PowerShell script?
i'd be keen to know your thoughts on this.
Is it possible to use puppet to auto create user accounts in Active Directory? The idea being that puppet could regularly process a text file?
Puppet's User resource type has a provider for managing local users on Windows machines, but to the best of my knowledge, it does not manage AD users. Even if it did, however, "regularly process[ing] a text file" for this purpose is somewhat at odds with the Puppet idiom, and probably would not rely on User resources anyway.
or is this really something much better handled outside of puppet using a PowerShell script?
If you can do it by running a PowerShell script on a machine under Puppet management, then you can have Puppet do that for you. With that said, I'm not too keen on the general idea, whether mediated by Puppet or not. There is a bit too much separation for me between the decision to add a user and the fulfillment. I would rather see either Puppet (or some other software) managing users in much more detail, or no automation of new-user creation at all.
