Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (89 mails)

[Jon Stockill <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 15 May 2000, Alan Harris wrote:

> What's wrong with the command line option? It took me approx 3 hours to
> add 500+ users to our (dare I say it) Red Hat box. It really depends
> upon how you deal with user names. I have created 250 users for each
> year group in the form YR7xxx to YR11xxx. These users are never deleted
> from the system, just the areas cleaned out as required (e.g.: years
> 7,8,9 are archived then cleared, year 11 is archived then cleared, then
> year 10 files are moved from the year 10 user area to its equivalent
> year 11 user area and the passwords changed as necessary, followed by
> flushing the old year10 files). It certainly works better under NT than
> deleting and adding 200+ users every year.
> 
> Under Linux you could create a shell script or a perl script to do this 
> by reading information from a csv file (which can be created and
> maintained via a spreadsheet).

I'd recommend PDAddUser. Written by a network administrator at a school in
the USA - why reinvent the wheel.

It'll take a list of names, generate unique usernames from them (you can
specify how the usernames should be created from the full names), specify
where the home directories are to be created (so you don't have to have
thousands under /home/), and will generate random passwords for all the
users (I know some places use the data of birth for the default password,
but kids aren't stupid, and you'll find that they'll have this worked out
*way* before everyone has had chance to change their password!)

You can get this handy bit of software here:

http://ghs.ssd.k12.wa.us/~pdavis/projects/pdadduser.html

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._|on ._)tockill                               <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>