Topic: Batch add users

[bloodshoteye]

Hi all,

I'm setting up an SME8 server for a client. Is there any way to batch add users, say from a file od pre-prepared details? (LAT tools is no longer an option).
This thread http://forums.contribs.org/index.php/topic,47217.0.html does not really answer my question.

Cheers,

[byte]

How many users are you talking about adding at any one time?

At the moment there is no facility/contrib to do this.

[bloodshoteye]

How many users are you talking about adding at any one time?

At the moment there is no facility/contrib to do this.

About 500

If it were just a few dozen users there would be no issue, but this client is a school with a Monday morning 7.5.1 server crash. Lovely.
RAID had also failed and drive contents were unavailable at the time.

It took me more than 12 hours to painstakingly add 500 users via the panel to a fresh 8.0b6, so no LAT tools.
By the way I strongly advise against any further use of LAT tools. I suspect they are the cause of the school's Affa server being unusable after a rise. I had been using the tools for about 2 years. It seems that users and UIDs were confused. Root could not chown homes and files to correct ownerships.
Thanks to an extra daily rsync backup to usb, I had all user and /opt data. I still have to see if I have Moodle and other databases; it's been a long 72 hours with almost no sleep...
 
I'm no coder, so cannot create a SME contrib to batch-add users.
It would be great to have a link on the user panel: browse and upload a suitable file, click "Add Users", kick back and watch users be created.

Cheers,

[cactus]

I'm no coder, so cannot create a SME contrib to batch-add users.
It would be great to have a link on the user panel: browse and upload a suitable file, click "Add Users", kick back and watch users be created.

A proper backup made through SME Servers backup routines restored on a clean machine should give you users and data. To keep you from sleep deprivation in the future I suggest you also make a disaster backup as that would make it easier to at least restore accounts and basic configuration. Please take a good nights sleep and then start reading:

http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:Administration_Manual:Chapter10#Backup_or_restore
http://wiki.contribs.org/Backup_with_dar

[bloodshoteye]

A proper backup made through SME Servers backup routines restored on a clean machine should give you users and data. To keep you from sleep deprivation in the future I suggest you also make a disaster backup as that would make it easier to at least restore accounts and basic configuration. Please take a good nights sleep and then start reading:

http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Documentation:Administration_Manual:Chapter10#Backup_or_restore
http://wiki.contribs.org/Backup_with_dar

Noted and appreciated.
This of course assumes you have a properly installed and working system in the first place. Which the school had, along with the Affa server mentioned above. Good enough under normal circumstances. But things went pear shaped - see above.
A new installation will of course be backed up one way or another as per SME best practices as you mentioned - thanks for the reminders.

However, my question is still applies - is there any way (at this time) to batch-add users to a fresh install of SME8, if existing accounts and basic configuration are not available for some reason? - obviously not.
And what if one is installing a server for the first time ever, and there are 500 users? Surely other admins have also wondered this.

Cheers,

[schmerold]

Lazy Administrator's Toolkit is the answer to the question.
After installing the toolkit, all you need to do is run this from shell:
lat-users -a -c "login|fname|lname|pw1234"

Nice, I spent better part of the morning hunting this down.

[bloodshoteye]

Lazy Administrator's Toolkit is the answer to the question.
After installing the toolkit, all you need to do is run this from shell:
lat-users -a -c "login|fname|lname|pw1234"

Nice, I spent better part of the morning hunting this down.

That's why I want to use it - it's very nice, especially when you have hundreds of new users and hundreds of departing users every year. But I had a negative experience with it - on a 7.5x server at that.
The contrib is currently unsupported and out of date (as far as I can tell). Not keen to burn my fingers again.
If you care to, let the thread know how it works out for you.

Cheers,