Section 118. Add a New User


118. Add a New User

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

117 About Administrative Responsibilities


SEE ALSO

119 Grant Admin Capabilities to Another User

120 Restrict Another User's Capabilities

122 Delete a User


It's a good idea to create a separate user account for each person who will be using the computereach member of your family, each student in your class, each employee in your office. It doesn't matter how many accounts your system has; each account's impact on the computer's resources is minimal, consisting of one more Home folder hierarchy in the Users folder. But making sure that each person has to log in separately into a separate user environment keeps each person's activities from affecting anyone else's documents and settings.

118. Add a New User


Each user must be created in a separate action. To create a user account, you must have the user's full name, his short name (or username), his password, and ( optionally ) a hint that the person can use if he forgets his password. Ask the person what short name, password, and password hint should be used in creating his new accountor, if you prefer, make them up yourself. Mac OS X will supply a default short name derived from the full name; this short name as a practical matter only appears as the name of the user's Home folder.

TIP

It's good security practice for every user's password to be as secret as possibleand that means that ideally , even you shouldn't know the new user's password. The best way to proceed is to have the other person nearby while you create his account; have him type in his password and hint, so that you don't have to know what it is. Alternatively, set a temporary password (such as ChangeThis ) and tell the user that he must change his password as soon as possible. See 121 Change a User's Password for more information.


NOTE

You must be logged in as an Admin user, or able to authenticate as one using the lock icon in the Accounts Preferences pane, to create a new user account.


1.
Open the Accounts Preferences

Open the System Preferences application (under the Apple menu); click Accounts to open the Accounts Preferences pane.

2.
Add a New User Account

Click the + icon at the bottom left to create a new user account. The user's account is immediately partially created and appears in the list on the left with no name and a randomly chosen login picture. The right pane contains fields in which you must enter the user's full name, short name, password, and a password hint before the account is fully created.

3.
Enter a Name

Type the user's full name. This text entry can contain spaces, apostrophes , and other special characters ; it should match how the user naturally writes his full name.

4.
Enter a Short Name

The short name is what's used at the lower Unix level to identify each user and to provide an easy-to-type user ID (such as jsmith ). The short name is also used as the name for the user's Home folder. You won't often have a need to use the short name in Mac OS X (unless you use some of the more advanced Unix features), but if you're logging in at the login window (and you've configured it to require each user to type his name and password rather than picking his picture from the list), you can use either the full name or the short name to identify yourself.

NOTE

Short names are generally in all lowercase letters by convention, but you can use capital letters if you want. Logging in using the short name is not a case-sensitive operation, but many of the more advanced Unix features are case-sensitive regarding the short name. It's generally best to just stick with all lowercase letters when choosing a short name.

After you enter the user's full name in step 3, Mac OS X automatically chooses a short name, created by removing any special characters and spaces from the Name field and converting it all to lowercase. You can accept the short name that the system picks for you, or you can type any short name that isn't already used by an account in the system. The short name can be as long as you want, but try to keep it under 10 or 12 characters to make it easy for the user to type.

TIP

If you are adding a large number of accounts (such as in a business environment), it's a good idea to develop a plan for assigning unique, short, and predictable short names to users. A standard username form might include the first five letters of the last name, followed by the first and middle initials , as in doejq for John Q. Doe.

5.
Enter a Password and Hint

Type a password for the new user. A good password should be about six to eight characters in length, should not be any word that can be found in the dictionary (or be the same as the short name or anything else that can be guessed easily by someone trying to break in), and should contain at least one special punctuation or symbolic character (such as @, # , or ! ). A good password scheme might be to pick all the first letters from the title of a favorite song, or to pick a name of a pet and change the occurrences of S to $, A to @ , and so on.

TIP

Each user can change her password at will (see 121 Change a User's Password ), but you might want to at least educate users about what makes a good password. Passwords should be complicated enough to be unguessable, but simple enough for the user to remember easily.

If you need help coming up with a good password to use, click the " key " button to open the Password Assistant panel. This is a tool that suggests appropriate passwords for you to use according to several different schemes, including Memorable (for passwords composed of English words cleverly strung together), Letters and Numbers , and Manual . Use the Length slider to select how long you want the suggested password to be; longer passwords are better and more secure, as indicated by the Quality meter below the slider. In Manual mode, type a password of your choice into the Suggestion box, and the Quality meter shows how good the password is; the Tips box offers pointers on how to improve your entered password, such as pointing out whether it's derived from dictionary words, too short, or otherwise too easy to guess. Try to pick a password where the quality meter is long and green rather than short and red, and where the Tips box has no improvements to suggest.

NOTE

The Password Assistant utility automatically fills in its suggested password into the Password field of the sheet in the Account Preferences pane; however, it doesn't fill it into the Verify field. You have to type that yourself, to make sure the password has been entered correctly and memorized.

Enter the chosen password twiceonce in the Password field, and again in the Verify field. Entering the password twice helps ensure that the password is entered correctly, because it's hidden as you type it.

To assist the user in remembering his password, you can enter a "hint," which is text that appears if the user tries several times to enter the password unsuccessfully. The hint should suggest what the password is to the user, but shouldn't make it too obvious to the uninformed. For instance, if your password is C@mpbell , you can make the hint Mother's maiden name with @ for A . You can also elect not to enter a hint at all.

6.
Create the New User

After you've entered a full name, short name, and password, click anywhere else in the Account Preferences paneon another user in the user list, on the Picture tab, or on the Login Options icon, for instance. When you do this, the new account is created, along with its Home folder.

TIP

If you make a mistake or change your mind about creating the new user account, click the button under the user list to cancel the operation.




MAC OS X Tiger in a Snap
Mac OS X Tiger in a Snap
ISBN: 0672327066
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 212
Authors: Brian Tiemann

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