On 12-Mar-2003/16:36 -0500, Tom Kovalcik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >I am proposing setting up a grade school with a computer lab using 24 linux >machines (actually the WalMart $200 Lindows machines) serving about 200 >users. My initial idea is to setup a redhat server for the home directories >and use NIS for login authentication. Up until now, I have only set up >systems with around 10 users. Should I approach a large user base any >differently? Is there a quick way to add users and generate random >passwords for each user?
You may not want truly random passwords for this group, unless you're willing to deal with them being written down, then lost. There are password generators that can generate passwords that consist of a combination of dictionary words and special characters, eg. quick23walk. If you want random passwords, the mkpasswd utility that ships with Red Hat allows you to specify the length, and number of digits, uppercase, lowercase, and special characters. You can also have mkpasswd assign the password to the user as it is generated. A script to generate the accounts and assign passwords might look like this: let "count = 0" for newuser in `cat userlist.txt`; do echo "Adding $username" useradd "$username" echo -n "$username " >> acctinfo.txt mkpasswd "$username" >> acctinfo.txt let "count = $count + 1" done echo "Created $count accounts" That should give you a space-delimited file with all the usernames and passwords. As a school sysadmin, you should probably take a look at the Simple End User Linux (SEUL) web site. They have a large section just for schools. http://www.seul.org/ Tony -- Anthony E. Greene <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key: 0x6C94239D/7B3D BD7D 7D91 1B44 BA26 C484 A42A 60DD 6C94 239D AOL/Yahoo Messenger: TonyG05 HomePage: <http://www.pobox.com/~agreene/> Linux. The choice of a GNU generation <http://www.linux.org/> -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
