[X4U] Multiple Users-Panther

[Kirk McElhearn]

On 11/9/04 6:20 PM, "Richard Gilmore" <rgilmor at uwo.ca> wrote:

> Is there a way to setup multiple users at once instead of doing it one by
> one? I work at a university and we have about 800 students would it be
> possible to enter all of them at once and set a level of security on them
> and enter a default password at the same time. Doing them all individually
> is not practical. We're around a dozen Macs in a building of around 300 XP
> boxes which uses a Windows 2003 server with primary domain controller so any
> student can sign in on any PC with a student number and password. For
> security reasons they would like to have access to the Macs restricted to
> students who have to sign on in a similar fashion. Can anything like this be
> done on Mac side?

Well, sort of...

You have to realize that OS X client is _not_ designed for such usage. You
can, however, create multiple accounts by entering the information in a flat
file and importing it.

This article on my site shows how to do this for a single user; you can
extrapolate how to do it for multiple users:

http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=2004110211244242

However, it doesn't explain how to import multiple passwords. I'm not
exactly sure if you can do that - you might want to check some BSD
documentation and see if it is possible.

The other solution would involve using some sort of directory server, and
maintaining the students' home folders on a central server. But, again,
that's more of an OS X server thing - you might want to look into purchasing
the server software, where user and group management is much simpler (well,
more complex, but designed for many users).


Kirk

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