[MacTUG] AFP548 - Convert a Local Account to an External Account

[Marlon A. Griffith]

Convert a Local Account to an External Account
Wednesday, April 15 2009 @ 03:52 pm CDT
Contributed by: macshome


The other day I was talking to some folks that had a very interesting situation. They are a fairly large organization and they have no directory services at all for workstation logins. Adding to this fun is the idea that they wanted to have a universal tech-type account that IT could use for doing work, but they did not want to have a cloned user account on all the Macs. Sounds like a tough nut to crack, but I had a trick up my sleeve.

The external account.

Read on for more...


What the heck is an external account?

Very simply put, an external account is a mobile account that doesn't live in /Users. It carries with it all of the bits that the account needs to function and thus can wander from Mac to Mac. If the account is known to the Mac via a directory service you can just login as normal, if it isn't a known account then you are prompted on the Mac to allow it to use that system.

Really there is nothing special about an external account at all, it's simply a mobile account. If you were to put a Mac with a mobile account on it into Target Disk Mode then other Macs would see it as havin an external account on it. For this article we aren't going to dissect external accounts in great detail, but we are going to see a cool use for them.

http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20090415155232756