I’ve been setting up a Windows 2003 server at work for use by our high school students. One of the problems with setting up the server has been that the home folders that are created either by a script or by the Active Directory Users and Computers tool end up being owned by Administrator. Normally this isn’t a bad thing, but if you want to use the disk quota system built into Windows 2003 server, then it is imperative that the owner of the folder is the user you are trying to quota.

While researching how to quickly change the ownership of a large group of folders, I discovered a tool that all Windows System Administrators should install. It is called subinacl.exe and it is a command line tool that can be used to change ownership of objects (including files and folders) within an Active Directory environment. After installing that tool (which is a free download from Microsoft), I was able to add one line to the script I’m using to create the users folders that also changes the ownership of the folder to the user rather than the Administrator. Very slick and a big time saver for me.

–Pete