In my environment, I have several projects that involve running NTFS ACL audit reports and various ACL cleanup activities on a number of file servers. There are two main reasons why I cannot perform these activities locally on the servers:
1) I do not have local access to the servers as they are actually owned and administered by another company.
2) They are Linux SNAP NAS servers which run a modified Linux OS (called GuardianOS) so even if I could get local access, I'm not sure of the availability of tools to perform the operations I need.
With that out of the way, I ended up rolling my own ACL audit reporting tool that would recurse down the filesystem starting at a specified top-level path and would spit out an HTML report on all the groups/users it encountered on the ACLs as well as showing the changes in permissions as it descended the tree. While developing this tool, I found out that the network overhead was the worst part of doing these operations and by multi-threading the process, I could achieve substantially greater performance.
However, I'm still stuck for finding a good tool to perform the ACL modifications and cleanup. Your standard out of the box tools (cacls, xcacls, Explorer) seem to be single-threaded and suffer significant performance penalty when going across the network.
The Question
Are there any faster tools than Explorer or CACLS for performing NTFS ACL modifications across the network?
