Ltsp-manager/User accounts

In school-like environments, the following three ways can be used to manage user accounts. As an example, let's assume that the school has 6 classes called "a1, a2, b1, b2, c1, c2", and that its computer lab has 12 workstations.

One account per workstation
In primary schools, you might prefer to have a single user account for each workstation, for example let's name them pc01, pc02, ..., pc12. To accomplish this, go to the File > Create accounts per workstation menu, and fill in the following data:
 * Group names: pc
 * Number of accounts per group: 12
 * Username template: {c}{0i}
 * Realname template: {c}{0i}
 * Password template: globalpass

With only one account per workstation, you might also want to enable LDM_AUTOLOGIN in lts.conf so that LDM automatically logs in those users. The downside of course is that since these accounts will be shared between classes, there might be complaints about changed wallpapers or deleted files.

One account per class and per workstation
In schools where the students are more than the available workstations, you might prefer to create an account for each team of 2-3 students that work together on the same PC. To accomplish this, go to the File > Create accounts per workstation menu, and fill in the following data:
 * Group names: a1 a2 b1 b2 c1 c2
 * Number of accounts per group: 12

The account names will be like a1-01, which means "account for team of class a1 that works on pc01". Since each team has its own account, you can allow the students to change their wallpapers etc.

An alternative scheme is to name the groups based on the year of admission, so that they can keep the same accounts for all the years that they stay in the same school. In this case you'd have:
 * Group names: u17a u17b u16a u16b u15a u15b

"u" there stand for "user", "17" for "2017", and "a", "b" are two classes of the same grade. The resulting user accounts would be like u17a-01 for pc01, u17a-02 for pc02 etc.

One account per user
In some schools there are enough workstations for each student to be able to work alone. There, you might prefer to create a separate account for each student. LTSP Manager supports four ways to create separate user accounts per student:

Create new user
You can manually create new users from the ''Users > New user" menu. Of course that is time consuming and should only be done for a few new students or teachers.

Allow user sign ups
The first time when you teach in a new class, go to the Groups > New group menu, and type the class name, e.g. 'a1'. Check the [v] Create system folders for this group, and also check all the teachers that teach in this class.

Then, go to the Server > Allow user sign ups menu, and check the [v] Students role, and the a1 group, as shown in the picture to the right. After pressing Next, a dialog will open that will allow you to monitor and approve the user signup requests, as long as it stays open.

At that point open your lts.conf and put the following directives under [Default]: LDM_MENU_ITEM_0="New &user signup..." LDM_MENU_COMMAND_0="/usr/share/ltsp-manager/signup"
 * 1) Show a "Preferences > New user signup..." menu in LDM.

Finally, (re)boot your LTSP clients and tell the students to go to the login screen Preferences > New user signup menu, and fill in their username, real name, password etc. You have the option to decline their requests if they're inappropriate.

Import from passwd
In case you already had all the user accounts in a previous installation, LTSP Manager allows you to import them, as long as you have a backup of the old /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/gshadow.

Import from csv
If you go to the Server > Export to csv menu, you can get a backup of your current user accounts. You can also use it as a template that you can open in e.g. LibreOffice calc and quickly fill in the data for all the required user accounts, if you have them in some other format, like a database. After you finished editing the .csv, you can import it from the Server > Import from csv menu.