On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 09:27:11AM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 2003, Zed Pobre wrote:
>
> > I have written code (in Perl) that replicates much of the
> > behaviour of adduser and deluser (down to command-line switch
> > compatibility), but modifies user information in a LDAP database
> > instead of flat files like /etc/passwd.
>
> Erm, did you check over the open adduser bugs? There was a request
> for this some time ago, and I've come up with patches to integrate
> all of the necessary functionality into LDAP. I'm just giving it
> some time for people to test and report breakages before I give the
> patch to Roland for inclusion in the official adduser package.
Gah. I hate when that happens. Oh well, it was a good excuse to
learn Perl, and it solved a need that I personally couldn't wait on
anyway.
> Could you elaborate on what ways yours works better than the original
> adduser? I'm sure Roland would love to hear about functionality
> improvements, and I'd certainly be keen for any improvements to the
> LDAP-specific code...
My version will iterate through a list of users, has a "quiet"
mode that fills in only minimal information automatically, and instead
of calling chfn, produces questions that better represent the kind of
information you can store with the cosine and inetorgperson schemas
(first name and surname are split up, for instance, and you can tell
it to ask additional questions about departmental code, title, etc.).
Since I still have a need to better handle bulk account creation,
I'm contemplating adding in support for automatic password generation
in the next day or two as well.
> > public as it is and inviting patches. I could make an entirely
> > separate package out of it (ldapusertools, or some such), but I
> > thought I'd ask here first if the project would rather have me work
> > with either the adduser or ldap-utils folks to merge these scripts
>
> It's an adduser thing, best to keep it there.
>
> There's no need for totally separate adduser and adduser-ldap
> programs - the two co-exist quite nicely.
Okay, should I be sending my scripts to you to look at, then?
--
Zed Pobre <zed@debian.org> a.k.a. Zed Pobre <zed@resonant.org>
PGP key and fingerprint available on finger; encrypted mail welcomed.
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