CreateUser and ClearReg.pkg

[sgstuart]

Hey guys,
If you want to use the password in encrypted form (password_hash), which I would recommend. Then you would want to leave the password section alone and leave it commented out. If you do uncomment the password line (removing the # in front of password), then it will not look at the password_hash, and will use the password that is in between the “”, so if you uncomment that line and delete everything in between the ” “, then your password most likely is blank, but I am not sure if the system would accept that, so I do not know what the end result would truly be.

On the GID and UID, as long as you are only creating one user, and that being the admin user, you would leave those alone. If you are going to be making multiple users (you would copy the createUser.pkg and edit each one for each user), you will only uncomment the UID, if you want to specify, and make sure a certain User ID gets a specific UID or number. The GID is for group ID, the default GID = 20, means the group staff. If you want the created user to be part of a different group then uncomment it and change it.

The only part I currently have seen problems with is the kickstart part at the end of the postflight, which is commented out by default. I am in the process of testing another variation of it, and will update the other posting on this.

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

[nobrainer]

I did have it uncommented, and I had the password set between the ” “, but it didn’t use it, it ignored it and made it “password”. I’m trying again with our password in there w/o the ” ” stuff… if that doesn’t work – I will try the passhash…Looking at the script, it looks like it prompts me for setting the PW? Will it know what account to associate it with?

[sgstuart]

Hi Brian,
It looks like the way you have yours setup, it is creating the Mac_User first, then Mac_Admin, and then ARD_User. Assuming that you are not specifing the UID, your Mac_Admin user would not have the recommended UID of 501. All in all the UID does not really matter, so I am not too worried about that. However, the first ID that is created usually has the extra special privileges and usually needs admin access.
So my recommendation would be putthe Mac_Admin package first.

Hi NoBrainer,
The ( and the $ both could have problems with in scripts in general. I would recommend using the password_hash method, and commenting the password line out in the USERDATA section.

For the background, I think you would have to create a LaunchDaemon, as it would require the com.apple.desktop to exist for the user already. The command to change it on command line is
defaults write com.apple.desktop Background ‘{default = {ImageFilePath = “/path/to/picture”; };}’

There is a command you can use for the loginwindow background

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture ‘/path/to/picture’

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

[sgstuart]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: nobrainer[/u][p]I did have it uncommented, and I had the password set between the ” “, but it didn’t use it, it ignored it and made it “password”. I’m trying again with our password in there w/o the ” ” stuff… if that doesn’t work – I will try the passhash…Looking at the script, it looks like it prompts me for setting the PW? Will it know what account to associate it with?

[/p][/QUOTE]

Hi nobrainer,
the password hash would only be associated to the one user in that package and each package can have its own password_hash. I have been using this part flawlessly and it is pretty slick. It did take me a little while (2 tries) to understand how to setup the hash initially.

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

[bdawg20000]

So i just finished dumping the image on a machine with the same results. The machine boots straight to the login screen but none of the user accounts work. When i click the back button on the list of users but it only contains “other” and none of the ones that i specified. Any ideas?

Thanks

Brian

[bdawg20000]

i just tried build the image again without any updates or other packages except for the create users packages. Looking through the logs again i noticed that it still says that 10.6.4 is not supported but the base OS is just 10.6.3 from the install DVD. could it be that the createUser.PKG won’t work when running InstaDMG on a 10.6.4 machine?

Thanks

Brian

[sgstuart]

Hi Brian,
hmm, I would expect createUser to work fine on 10.6.4, but I am not running 10.6.4 yet, or trying to create a 10.6.4 image yet. I am all 10.6.3 at this time. Next week I will probably be testing 10.6.4, but not sure. I know that it appears to have always been recommended to run the host machine in the same OS level that you are building, I personally am not sure of the reasonings, but I do know that when my host machine was at 10.6.2 it would not allow me to create a 10.6.3 image build. However, once I upgraded the host to 10.6.3 it worked great.

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

[nobrainer]

it created them on my 10.6.4

[nobrainer]

So close and yet so far. On 10.6.4 – using the password hash – it doesn’t seem to have worked. It created the account, hid the account, changed the profile picture, but the password didn’t go through again, and I couldn’t tell if the password even went through properly back into the createuser.pkg file – is there a way to check?

Can I put the password in quotes like below?

./shadowHash “($1″>password_hash

[sgstuart]

If you put the ” ” around it like you did the “‘s I believe would be part of the password , which should be easy enough to test. I am not sure off hand what characters are and are not allowed to be used in a password though. I am assuming that “‘s can be.

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

[nobrainer]

still no go 🙁
No errors from the createuser pkg, or the password hash thingy.. but it’s putting something in there, because even the default password doesn’t work.

[sgstuart]

At least for your testing purposes to begin with, try something pretty standard with only letters and numbers just to get it to work, then add special characters in case that is what is causing the problems.

Thanks,
Steven Stuart

[nobrainer]

Yeah, You’re right, it’s gotta be the password i’m trying to use.

I will have to work on it more next week.

Thank you for ALL your help!

[bdawg20000]

I have finally gotten a user created with the CreateUser.pkg but the password didn’t work correctly when i did it. I am trying to create 3 users accounts with 3 different packages. The first package created the user account but with the password for the second package and the 3rd package doesn’t seem to have ran at all. Any ideas? It seems to be an order of how things are created. the first 2 accounts to be created are both admin accounts.

Thanks

Brian

[bdawg20000]

All, I was able to get all three users created successfully. I had to change the post flight script so that it read 10.6 when doing version checking instead of it reading 10.5. I also set the uid manually and set them starting at 501, then 503 and then 505. I am still struggling getting a password to be create correctly using some special characters but that is minor to me and can be changed later. Thanks for all the help on the issue.

Thanks

brian

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