You can certainly do this by creating a suitable script. There is a feeling that others have mentioned that some kind of graphical tool to help schools with this would be useful: what do others think? This list is not exclusive - users of other distributions are welcome ... :) On Sat, 13 May 2000, Dave Williams wrote:

On 03 May, Roger Whittaker wrote:

...

Time for a few more people to introduce themselves ...

...

If you're new to the list or haven't posted before, just let us know who you are and what you're doing or hope to do with Linux ...

...

Don't be shy ...

...

The more people use the list, the more useful it will be.

I feel like a bit of an intruder (I am atm a RedHat user) but I am willing to change to SUSE if this group proves to be useful.

I am the ICT coordinator of a large, mixed platform, secondary school. We have roughly 150 Acorn/PCs which can connect to a RedHat server running Samba. My concerns centre around the account management tools available ie. the methods that can be used to add 200+ users at a time.

Does anyone have any techniques which can help with this?

Dave Williams

-- Roger Whittaker SuSE Linux Ltd The Kinetic Centre Theobald Street Borehamwood Herts WD6 4PJ ---------------------- 020 8387 1482 ---------------------- roger@suse-linux.co.uk ----------------------

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). As for exporting user names from RM Connect, you couldn't do it under their previous system and I don't suppose they will release the information any way!

From experience trying to make anything work with RM is a problem but it may have changed...

For the odd user you could do a lot worse than to look at the Webmin package (www.webmin.com) which is great for remote managing Linux boxes and is, of course, opensource and free ..... Giles Nunn wrote:

There are two packages which spring to mind here in SuSE. KDE includes the kuser user manager for graphical admin - but only one at a time. For bulk usernames there is the newusers command line tool - we mailmerge data into a file in the right format. I am supposed to be looking at exporting usernames from RM connect to create mailboxes under Linux. If anyone has done this, it would save me some time. _____________________________________ Giles Nunn - Network Manager Carms Schools ICT Development Centre Tel: +44 01239 710662 Fax: 710985 ____________________________________

On Mon, 15 May 2000, Roger Whittaker wrote:

...

You can certainly do this by creating a suitable script.

There is a feeling that others have mentioned that some kind of graphical tool to help schools with this would be useful: what do others think?

This list is not exclusive - users of other distributions are welcome ... :)

On Sat, 13 May 2000, Dave Williams wrote:

...

On 03 May, Roger Whittaker wrote:

...

Time for a few more people to introduce themselves ...

...

If you're new to the list or haven't posted before, just let us know who you are and what you're doing or hope to do with Linux ...

...

Don't be shy ...

...

The more people use the list, the more useful it will be.

I feel like a bit of an intruder (I am atm a RedHat user) but I am willing to change to SUSE if this group proves to be useful.

I am the ICT coordinator of a large, mixed platform, secondary school. We have roughly 150 Acorn/PCs which can connect to a RedHat server running Samba. My concerns centre around the account management tools available ie. the methods that can be used to add 200+ users at a time.

Does anyone have any techniques which can help with this?

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 -- ___ _ In a world without fences - who needs Gates? | (_' M1CHW ._|on ._)tockill