Passenger v3.7.9 review
Passenger is one of those tools that is very crucial to running OS X Server. It is not needed in the sense that you need it to run your OS X Servers, or even administer them. It is needed in a sense that it makes mundane long manual data entry into your directory as easy as eating pie. With this tool, it will help you stream line your time and make you more efficient at importing user accounts, migrating home folders and running batch POSIX permissions changes on home folders as well.
I know that you can manually do everything Passenger does, but it does it for you in such a stream lined manner it is worth every penny. If I recall one user license is ballpark $100 to $150 which is worth it in the long run. To give a testimony to it's usefulness, I just imported over 6,000 user accounts into my Open Directory with Passenger and I was able to assign unique passwords, set short name formula, set UID range, and create files ready to import via Work Group Manager in a matter of hours.
So, lets take a look at what Passenger can do and the basics of how it works...
This is the basic user interface here. You will notice that it has buttons along the top menu bar there depending on which feature you would want to use of the application. Of course everyone hates manual data entry so lets look at creating user accounts for importing into Open Directory.
By clicking on the import button on the top left you will get a dialog box asking what you wish to import. I work in a school system so I get plain text files exported from our student enrollment program which contains first name, last name, date of birth (6 digit format), grade, building, and student ID number. It is delimited by commas, so I just import that file right in there. I typically import the text into a spread sheet though first and chop up what I want to import. I find with our user name conventions it is easiest for me to do it by grade level.
Now it will give you the option to either use a text, csv, excel, delimited or XML file to import your accounts off of. If your home folders never get touched and are on a separate volume you can point passenger to read the home folder names and create short names off of that, however, I have not used that feature yet. Once you import them you will get another window that pops up asking what you want to do with the data it is reading off your file.
Now the files that I received from enrollment were plain text files with categories separated by comma. Sometimes if it can't read the header of your file it will show jibberish, and you can simply check that box that says ignore first line. As you can see on the left hand side of this screen shot I have my options for where each data entry goes. I can set First Name, Last Name, User Name (long name), short name, password, password hint, group, group ID, home folder paths, so on and so forth. On the right hand side is the data I got from my imported text file. Now all I have to do is match the category with the data entry by using the mouse to double click it.
Now you can see that I matched the category with the data. The first line of my imported file is not important to me in Open Directory so I am choosing to ignore it. I then have the first name, last name, their short name and their password ready to be imported. Now this is my simple set up but you can see the potential here to get really down and organized with your imported data. I keep my set up pretty simple, or as simple as I possibly can to not over complicate things. The rest of what I set up for importing accounts is based on presets in Work Group Manager.
Now, another great thing about passenger is that once you import this data like I listed above it is now time to configure it. This next screen shot will show you how I configured it for the Open Directory side.
I set the beginning UID to be 28000 for this batch of users so it won't conflict with any other user already in my directory. I set the password type to Open Directory and made sure their default shell is /bin/bash. You can also add in comments and keywords here too as well. You can also set home folder paths, groups, and other data if you look at the tabs above. I however, opted not to use these featuers and used my presets I built off test user accounts in Work Group Manager. Now once you have everything set here is another thing that Passenger can do which is an awesome time saver, especially if you have many users who may have the same or similar names.
As you can see it found some duplicate names in my import files. Now, I had checked an option in Passenger to append conflicts with a number. As you can see when it found duplicates it would automatically add a 1 behind the full name and it should also drop the last letter of the short name and then add that same number. When you work at a school district with 20,000 students you are probably going to have some with the same or similar names. So you no longer have to worry about duplicates causing problems and if you organize your presets like I do to have special words in the comments you can tell which user is who by the comments in Work Group Manager. I will do a tech doc on using WGM one of these days that explains this stuff further. You can also view a complete list of data ready for import from this feature, pictured below:
You can see that it lists everything here ready for you to check before you get ready to import the files into your directory. I have heard many other Systems Administrators tell me how all of this can be done with the built in tools that Apple provides, and they are right it can be done for free with the built in tools. However, those tools make you responsible for programming all the delimiters and you have to figure out how to organize the data. These import features are worth the money for this program already. I am surprised Apple has not just bought Passenger and integrated this product into their Server OS.
Once you are finsihed with everything and everything tests good you can now hit the export button and it will dump all of htis into a nice text file you can import with WGM into your directory.
Batch Permissions jobs
Another feature that I used is the batch permissions job. Only because it is really easy to mount a share point and run the command. You can even save the Passenger task to a shell script and have launchd or cron automate permissions fixes.
The down side to this feature is it seems to only support POSIX permissions and not ACLs. Which is not horrible, but it would be a nice touch. You simply set your read, write and execute permissions for owner, group and everyone for the home directory and public, shared, and drop box folders. You simply mount the server share point on your mac and then click on the choose path button. Choose the root folder that holds the folders in question, and then it will ask for the root password. Input it and let it rip. This comes in handy if you like to keep all your home folders on separate volumes and never touch them, but you want to wipe out and rebuild your directory every so often. Since all user accounts will get new UIDs in a directory rebuild you can run this portion of the application to apply ownership back to the original owner. It uses all Unix commands under the hood, so no weird third party stuff goin on here.
The last feature of Passenger is home folder migration, which I have never used so I can't say that it is good or not. Here is a screen shot of what the GUI looks like:
Seems pretty simple and straight forward, but I have always personally done this from the command line. That is just me. If you are a person who is not comfortable with the command line or perhaps not used it and you come from a Windows world where everything has a graphical user interface Passenger is a must have.
Overall, if I had a rating system, which I don't (and I have a reviews section on my site, weird) I would have to give Passenger probably a 9/10. I don't think it is perfect and I think there is room for improvement, but what it does it does well. It also saves you so much time as a Directory Administrator. More info can be found at the website of the maker's of Passenger here:
http://macinmind.com/?pid=2&progid=1&subpid=1
Thanks for reading.
-Tom
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