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