Research Triangle PowerShell Users Group Tools for Automation, 27 Nov 2020

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From YouTube: PowerShell Lightning Talk: Create your own random password generator (Alan Kaplan)

Description

Alan Kaplan shares a solution he created for a problem he recently encountered at work: create 10,000 user accounts and make random, complex passwords for each user. He created a one line PowerShell script that uses the data on his machine to create the passwords. Check out this super creative way to solve a common problem with a minimal set of code .

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A

Hi I'm Alan Kaplan I'm, an Active Directory administrator for the Department of Veterans Affairs. The problem I had was with the Cova da pandemic. Coming VA had a huge number. We have about half a million than half a million employees, so we had a huge number of people who were gonna be working from home and they wanted to scale up the CAG infrastructure and the people who were scaling up the CAG infrastructure. We had on-prem citric access gateway.

A

We were spinning it up in Azure and we were spinning it up in AWS and they wanted to do stress. Testing of the new infrastructure, so I got tapped to create test accounts. So I, don't know man how many people have ever been asked to create 10,000 user accounts, but that was part of my task create ten thousand and one of the things is by default.

A

All the new users in VA have to use a smart card and if you don't use a smart card, even if it's a test account, there's a minimum password of 14 characters. It's pretty onerous because these user accounts we're going to be read in using.

A

You know programmatically I, wanted to create quickly complex passwords and I have done this a lot of ways before you know with lists of letters and things that are available and I think decided to take a minute to think about this and I came up with a one-liner for going through by the way the loop was, there was user, 1 user 2 was just a I plus plus, and it's just creating them down the list.

A

So the only really interesting question is: how do you set a password and we never use the same password twice so this.

B

Is the one-liner I came up with and I'll show you what it looks like and I'll walk you through I am NOT a dev guy. I am a IT administrator.

A

So this is an example.

B

Of the path course, every time you do it, you get a different answer. um What.

A

Occurred to me is how what's a way to get a pretty big set of letters and numbers and characters, and the answer is: if you start right.

B

It is your envelope right, so we all know that there. This is the envelope on my computer here, that is my home Media Center and my color scheme in the S code was unreadable, so forgive me for being an ISE.

B

So when you look at this, we got letters and we've got slashes and special characters. So what I've done is.

B

I'm getting the path I'm replacing spaces right. We have lots of spaces with a tilde.

A

That's to add complexity and nobody wants a space in the password.

B

When you do get a numerator.

B

I see drop the beginning when you do get a numerator you're getting.

B

ah This is killing me and you get do get in numerator. I need to break this up. This way.

B

B

You get one character, a character at a time, so you saw how this gives us a list of letters when I you can then pipe it to get random and select. However long you want I chose 15 won more than 14.

A

And the idea for me is I, didn't want to fat, fail our complexity test, so we have complexity rules for our passwords, certain number of uppercase lowercase numbers and special characters, and if you do it this way for 10,000 instances, you can actually not have sufficient. You can get. You know all smut lowercase letters, it's possible not likely.

B

So I went with an additional letter so after taking this right, I am.

B

B

The array becomes something like this.

B

Fine run fa, so you can see now I've gotten a random array against selected from the path and then I you can use join.

A

If you want to join a array.

A

Any characters you just select nothing and.

B

Then that's the result.

A

So that's the code I used to create the password for my new user accounts. It was quick. It was easy in 10,000 users, with this I had 3 passwords fail for complexity.

B

We just picked them up. Did those manually.

A

It's kind of a quick and easy: if you need to do sort of things, shows you the basics of what getenumerator does and.

B

Let's use how to use get random and joining.

A

B

That's it that sounds pretty cool. That was really interesting thanks much and it's cool, interesting solution.