Creating local accounts

[mconners]

Hello Everyone,

I was well on our way to imaging our labs and I ran into a rather strange road block.

We have been using CreateUserPkg to create local user accounts. Initially, this hasn't been an issue until today. We needed to create two different local admin accounts. As the CreateUserPkg doesn't seem to be supported any further, what are other people doing to create local accounts?

Are you doing it at imaging time? Are you creating them via policy?

Just curious what others are doing in this regard.

Thank you!!

[easyedc]

I've seen issues with it also. However Casper Remote and/or a Jamf policy can also create them. Have you tried those?

[donmontalvo]

Until we get DEP in place, we have techs create an admin account manually, enroll, then Thin Provisioning kicks off. If a second admin account is needed, it is added via policy at Thin Provisioning time (scoped appropriately).

[mm2270]

Is it possible to script this with the jamf binary to create the accounts? At what stage are these accounts needed on the Mac?

[Nix4Life]

@mconners what issues are you seeing? I used CreateUserpkg with 10.12.5 with no problem an hour ago. I have also used policies

[easyedc]

As a followup, what issue are you seeing with the CreateUserPkg? My issue was only that setting a user to a hidden status didn't completely work, but everything else did. Once registered with our JSS, a policy just runs to enforce the hidden user status.

[mconners]

Sorry for the long delay in getting back to your responses, we have been busy with new installs and so forth.

As for CreateUserPkg, it appears the issue is with hidden accounts, as mentioned above from @easyedc. We have since "tweaked" our process a bit. We have started to cache all the installs via a large deployment policy, we have added the local accounts via this policy so the accounts will be created at this initial stage.

After restarting, another policy is run against a smart group that locates any Mac with cached packages waiting. Then the policy installs any cached installs. This has been almost flawless for us after a few hundred Macs have been run through this process. Interestingly, outside of waiting for our new 21.5" iMacs to show up, our refresh process is almost done. This is like months early...something I have never had.

JAMF Pro is really a blessing. As there are a gazillion ways to do the same thing, sometimes, it just comes down to trial and error....lots of errors.

Thanks Everyone for responding, I sincerely appreciate the feedback.