1. Overview

You're a System Administrator?

If you are system administrator handling hundreds or thousands of users, you realize that manually creating all the users and setting all the file sharing permissions for all your users is time-consuming without a tool to help. The Mac, not the administrator, is the machine.

With Mac OS X Server 10.2 and above, all account information must be in a specific delimited format with descriptive headers before it can be imported. Although making the files in the right format is not particularly hard, Passenger gives the ability to use pieces of imported data to form user and group specific data, concatenate names, short names, and passwords.

Some good uses for Passenger:

1. Adding large numbers of new users to a server
2. Concatenating names, short names and passwords
3. Creating a password system based on username + master password for administrators to create and lookup passwords
4. Putting back passwords after installing a clean version of OS X Server
5. Setting proper permissions for Users folders after a migration

What Passenger does:

• Import User Data (Learn about it)

Passenger takes colon, comma, or tab-delimited text, ASIP or Mac OS X XML, or the names of folders in folders and imports names and other information to prepare for import into a server.

• Concatenate Names (Learn about it)

Use your imported data of first, last, and/or full name and other fields to formulate a concatenation for your names and short names.

• Create Passwords (Learn about it)

Passwords can be generated by a tough algorithm that takes a combination of the master password and the username. Passwords created this way can be regenerated with the same master password and username. There are a few styles of passwords to choose from which use a word-word or word number combination for security and easy memorization.

Password can also be formulated like names or simply passed through.

• Export for Servers

Exports for Mac OS X Server 10.2 - 10.5 Leopard Server, user-defined customized text export, Master Key, and Master Spell

• Create Folders (Learn about it)

Using the username formulation you choose you may generate folders with those names including nesting user folders in group folders. You may even include to put folder names of your choice within these folders such as "Documents" and "Preferences" for Macintosh Manager.

• Migration (Learn about it)

Passenger can be used to aid in the migration of users from AppleShare IP to Mac OS X Server in almost all regards. Also covered is moving documents and preferences from one set of account folders to another. Even if their names changed (such as to short names from usernames), it is possible to move files to their new home. And once you get them there...

• Batch Permissions (Learn about it)

Set file level privileges in batch for OS X. Keep your own sets of privilege sets. Default sets for Mac OS X Server and Macintosh Manager. Export Batch Permission sets as shell scripts