Once you get the hang of Extensible MAs a whole world of possibilities opens up. If you’re trying to achieve something that is related to Identity in some way, and it’s scriptable, then you can do it with an XMA.
One such example I came across, in a university environment, was personal websites. Certain users were eligible for a personal website but the creation and deletion of them was ad-hoc and unreliable. A user had to request the site be created, and then wait up to two weeks while the request was bounced around to various people, invariably including a few premature call closures, and re-openings by the increasingly disgusted user.
I felt this to be an excellent candidate for automation. The websites were on an Apache server so I wrote shell scripts to do all the work of creating/deleting the sites and the associated accounts (which I’m sorry but I’m not including because they are too site-specific and potentially sensitive). The scripts could then be called from the Windows environment using plink.
The design of the XMA is almost identical to the one I described for Netware home directories. The only real difference is the commands I call as part of the Export step in the CSExtension. I also archive the websites through a Samba share in exactly the same way.
To see the entire CSExtension click here.
