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From: eps@toaster.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Account Passwords (was Re: Toward a "Public NeXT Lab" guidebook)
Message-ID: <1755@toaster.SFSU.EDU>
Date: 18 Jun 91 07:07:53 GMT
References: <9106141908.AA25449@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1721@toaster.SFSU.EDU> <91168.102708SLVQC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Reply-To: eps@cs.SFSU.EDU (Eric P. Scott)
Organization: San Francisco State University
Lines: 39

In article <91168.102708SLVQC@CUNYVM.BITNET> SLVQC@CUNYVM.BITNET
	(Salvatore Saieva) writes:
>                                                           but it can become
>a huge amount of work to distribute passwords to users; ie: mail passwords
>to users at the start of a semester,

If you're clever, you only have to worry about password
distribution once per person per "lifetime."

At a typical school, students don't get new student numbers each
semester--that stuff is handled ONCE, and they get periodic
validation stickers for their ID cards.  You can do the same
thing electronically (I'll leave the details as an exercise for
the reader :-) ).

>                                     or (even worse) have a consultant
>distribute passwords after verifying the user's id.

What?  You don't trust your consultants?  You've got bigger
problems...

For our AC NeXT cluster, each new user receives a letter-sized
sheet folded in thirds:

	top /
	    \
	    /

The top third is visible, and bears the identifying information.
Most of the top two-thirds is a "welcome" letter, which (among
other things) instructs the user to change his/her password
IMMEDIATELY and TELL NO ONE.  The initial password appears
somewhere on the middle third.  The bottom third is printed with
a guard pattern, and the sheet is stapled.  These are collated
and can be picked up upon presentation of proper ID.  Simple,
inexpensive, relatively painless.  (And it has a "paper trail,"
which administrative types like.)

					-=EPS=-