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I work in a small company and have been spending a lot of time optimizing our network. Our security system is, sadly, abysmal, seeing as no one ever really took care of it. So I'm looking for an all-around solution for password assignment and management.

While I've found a bunch of threads and tools for the management part, the assignment part still eludes me. I'm gonna try and pack my problem into a straight-forward question: Is there a way to periodically set account passwords centrally - without having to change it on each account manually?

Our server runs on OS X and our network is made up of two Windows XP computers and mostly iMacs. The passwords we want to be able to manage are those of Network accounts, Kerio Mail accounts and the Computers' logins themselves.

Thank you very much in advance.

HopelessN00b
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Merritt6616
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1 Answers1

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You probably want to look into implementing Open Directory, or setting up an Active Directory forest, and integrating your Macs into that. Which you choose should probably be determined by whether you're going to be an all-Mac shop or not. If you plan on just having Macs as being the only devices you want to manage centrally, use Open Directory. If not, Active Directory with Mac integration is probably the way to go.

Either topic is frankly pretty massive, and you're going to have to do a lot of your own legwork to figure out how to best set up either one for your company's specific needs. (But it's well worth the effort, both in making your life easier now, and in making yourself more marketable to future employers.)

HopelessN00b
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  • Thank you for the reply! I checked it out, and it seems to be a great method. Sadly though, we won't be able to use it. Our server has very limited power and with the services we're running on it already, it's already pretty much maxed out. Network accounts would probably drop performance too much. So I'll probably have to deal with that, thank you again though for the competent answer :) – Merritt6616 Mar 20 '14 at 11:10