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5 Setting Up Group Accounts
This chapter tells you how to set up, edit, and manage group
accounts.
A group account offers a simple way to manage a collection of users with similar needs.
You can also create group folders, which provide an easy way for group members to
share files with each other.
You can use Workgroup Manager to view, create, edit, and delete group accounts.
To view group accounts in Workgroup Manager, click the Groups button above the
accounts list.
About Group Accounts
A group account stores the identities of users who belong to the group, as well as
information that lets you customize the working environment for members of the
group. When you define preferences for a group, the group is known as a workgroup.
A primary group is the user’s default group. Primary groups can expedite the validation
performed by the Mac OS X file system when a user accesses a file.
How Group Accounts Track Membership
Mac OS X Server uses GUIDs and a combination of the user’s short name and GID to
determine group membership. Before Mac OS X v10.4, group membership was based
only on a combination of the user’s short name and GID.
You can now have groups composed of users with all versions of Mac OS X. When you
use Workgroup Manager on Mac OS X Server v10.5 to add a member to a group, you
add both the user’s short name and GUID, which ensures backward compatibility.