From: Terry Kennedy [terry@gate.tmk.com] Sent: Monday, August 14, 2000 9:45 PM To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com Subject: Re: Mass adding of users? Don.Carlton@citadel.edu writes: > I'm sure this has come up before but, can't find a reference in the > archives. We are beginning a new semester soon and will be adding > several hundred new students. We have been using a product called > Manager that is no longer supported. This allows us to add 8 users at a > time. It creates their account with a new uic member number, creates > their directory and sets up quota for them. I am curious how other > schools are handling new account creation. I have seen several com > procedures that will create an account but they do them one at a time > interactively. What I would like is something that will add at least a > hundred users at a time. Maybe using a template account? 15 years or so ago, I investigated what was out there and didn't find anything I liked, so I cobbled up some programs to do what I needed. They probably aren't general-purpose enough to meet your needs, but I just put them up on my web server for you to look at. We handle batches of up to about 1000 adds at a time with them. The basic idea is that we get a list of students/faculty/administrators/ etc. from our Information Services group, which includes their full name, SSN, and type-specific information (year of graduation for students, office phone for faculty, etc.) This file is then fed to the MAKE program which spits out command files to create the UAF entry, create the directory, add a quota entry, etc. It also populates a RMS file which can be viewed with the USERINFO DCL procedure, and which is used by the DESTROY program to delete expired accounts. This was a set of quick-n-dirty hacks written 10+ years ago, and which I've never gotten around to cleaning up (and, since I don't work for SPC any more, will probably never get cleaned up). I used command procedures instead of directly performing the operations for a number of reasons - first, there's no supported interface for adding a UAF entry, and also this way if something goes wrong, you're not commit- ted to continuing - you can stop the step that had the problem, fix it, and re-run. Files: http://www.tmk.com/transient/make.bas http://www.tmk.com/transient/destroy.bas http://www.tmk.com/transient/userinfo.dcl (renamed to .dcl to make browsers happy). Terry Kennedy http://www.tmk.com terry@tmk.com Jersey City, NJ USA