Re: adding many users

[Michael Wardle <michael wardle adacel com>]

On Thursday, March 13, 2003 08:36, Tom Kovalcik 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?

My experience is that NIS works quite well for medium-sized enterprises.  I 
don't think you're likely to need to do anything differently for 200 users 
(assuming you already do backups, user quotas, etc.).

There are utilities to add multiple users quickly.  I find it just as easy to 
write a quick script that passes the necessary information to useradd.  You 
might like to look for makepasswd or mkpasswd to help automatically generate 
passwords for your users.  I think one of these comes in the expect package 
on Red Hat.

-- 
Michael Wardle
Adacel Technologies