Windows 2003/IIS Setup

I work at a university maintaining the computer science department server. I am looking for a more economical way to stream line the set up of student accounts. CS students are granted a Username and password an IIS virtual directory, FTP virtual directory, and a mysql database. Server is running windows server 2003R2 (Possibly migrating to 2008R2)

The server is running a domain though no students physically log a terminal into it (No computers are part of my domain.) Creating the account is a manual process. I did right a PHP script to query the Universities AD and copy the information and write it to my AD.

I then have to create basically the users home directory. I tried having AD do it but since the user never physically logs in it never creates the directory. Permissions on this folder are set to User – full, Instructors (group) – full, Users (group) – read, IUSER – read. Inside of the users folder their is a “Private” folder with permissions User – full, instructors (group) – full.

Next step is IIS I create a virtual directory in the default web site pointed to the users home directory so they have a website.

Same goes for FTP virtual directory in the default ftp configuration to allow the users to upload files to their website.

Mysql I have to create a user and password then create a mysql scheme (database) full access for the user and full access to the instructors account to be able to access the students database.

All of this is done manually and takes me a week to do. The closest description is maybe a shared hosting environment. Is there a better way to do this? Scripting wise, or better structure setup?

Is there any particular reason why you need to create the home directory? The profile isn’t setup because it’s not used for anything. If you need a shared folder, you can do it with a single shared folder rather than setting up the entire profile.

For the IIS scripting check out c:inetpubadminscriptadsutil.vbs. That’s a good command line tool for scripting things like this.

Mysql also has a command line tool which can automate the creation of the accounts and permissions.

Check more discussion of this question.

Related posts:

1. Why do I see different TCP behaviour between IIS and FTP server applications on Windows 2003?
2. How to authorize user for a subfolder
3. MySQL: account/db creation for users I am hosting, advice?
4. IIS 6 – how to create virtual directory like /my/custom/path
5. Is there a way to list all domain names for IIS setup?