Wow, you are using NT and your boss thinks it can't handle it?
Linux can do thrice as good with 1/4th the hardware. Simply put. Oh
yea, I forgot to add, 1/10th the maintenance.
Well, I worked for an ISP and we used a p133 with 64 megs of ram.
32 megs of swap, running crusty old slakware with a 1.something kernel
as a mail server for 7000 dial up customers. Not once was the system
overtasked. _However_ a mail server is as only good as it's disk system.
I recommend at a minimum UW SCSI and _top_ of the line disks. I would
prefer a good RAID controller and disk array.
Just to add some fuel to the NT battle, I have seen a quad pentium pro 200
with 256 megs of ram and a RAID 5 disk system suck eggs with 3000 users
running microshat exchange server. This machine cost nearly $40,000 and
did not fullfill the mission. The aforementioned Linux box can be built for
$1500 plus the disk system.
Oh yea, I forgot to figure in the plethora of security problems with NT
server.
If your company is of any size, I highly recommend your boss bring his
analyst
skills into the 90's. One thing employers like is people that can accomplish
the
job and save the company money. Your boss seems to be doing neither.
my 2 bits,
WC
Oops, back to your question.
Using perl, you can set up a simple web interface to add new users to the
system.
Real easy script, probably 50 lines of code (with error checking etc..) can
do this.
I did exactly the same thing at the ISP I worked for.
1) Copy the password file to a secure directory used by the script.
2) Have the script work from this file when checking for existing accounts
3) Have the script add entries to the real password file and this one
4) Have the script create the users home directory and set permissions
5) Always use this script to add user to the system, this way your local
password files stays updated.
6) Set this script to run from a secure area of the web server and allow on
the required ip addresses.
7) Have the script also authenticate the user for a password so that not
everyone
that gets to this page can create accounts
I had a utility page that allowed me to do several admin tasks remotely. It
became real
handy. However, make sure you know alot about security before slapping stuff
like this
on the web. I also suggest using the wrapper with Apache.
If you do not know perl, I might be able to scrounge up some of these
scripts for ya. But,
believe me, perl is so easy, you could pick up a book and be writing scripts
of this
caliber in a few days. I have also written a few programs for such tasks in
C++.
Chuck
-----Original Message-----
From: GateKeepeR News <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Redhat List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Friday, May 15, 1998 5:39 PM
Subject: adding users?
>Hello,
>I need to add a large (~700) number of users to linux for use as a
>mailserver. I really have no scripting knowledge whatsoever. My boss
>doesn't believe that Linux can handle our email (we are using NT and
>SLmail *cringe* right now). I have setup the server, but I need a way to
>add all the users over. SLmail will export all the information to a text
>file, whereas the accounts are listed as such:
>
>jsmith,John Smith,mypass,jsmith.mbx
>
>So he has the username of "jsmith", fullname of "John Smith", password
>of "mypass" and the jsmith.mbx is just the mailbox location, which would
>not be needed.
>
>I am sure that something could be worked out to just adduser <username>
>then passwd <username> to do all of them, but I don;t know how to do
>this. Any ideas to help a Linux geek convert a company over from NT? :)
>Thanks!
>
> Bryan
>
>
>--
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