Guest Account not showing up in login screen

Question

Level 1

9 points

Guest Account not showing up in login screen

I've enabled the guest account, but it does not show up in the login screen. Login options are set to "Display login window as: List of users". The Guest account is shown as "Login, Sharing." Advanced options show userid and groupid both as 201.

The only other change I made is that I created a hidden admin account, per the instructions here: http://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=18579.

The hidden admin account works fine. The userid and groupid I created were both 499. At the login window, the regular user name shows up followed by "Other...", which gives me a username/password form when clicked. This allows me to log in as the hidden admin.

But, I need the Guest account to also show up in the login window. Not sure why it's not showing up...

MacBook 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on May 16, 2008 10:28 AM

Reply

Answer 1

RodneyW

Level 4

3,041 points

May 18, 2008 6:56 AM in response to gecko85

I think that it is not showing up because you have hidden all user accounts with a userid of less than 500.

The troublesome command is this:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow Hide500Users -bool YES

To test this theory, set the preference to NO, or delete it. Unfortunately, your admin account will then be "visible", but I am not sure that you can have it both ways....

Cheers,

Rodney

Reply

Answer 2

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

May 18, 2008 7:07 AM in response to gecko85

Rodney is quite right. That command hides every user with uid below 500.
If you want Guest account to show you should change yes to no in that command. there is a different way to hide individual users from the login window using this [hint|http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050827123342292].

Reply

Answer 3

gecko85 Author

Level 1

9 points

May 19, 2008 8:11 AM in response to V.K.

Turns out you're both right, sort of...

* The Guest Account is hidden because it's a sub 500 user, so you guys were on the money there. (I hadn't realized it was a sub-500 user...)

* Using the hint at the link posted by V.K. to hide the secret administrator hides it ONLY from the login window, but not from the Accounts section of System Preferences...so, that solution doesn't work for me. (This is going on a master image, and the users will have admin rights, so they would be able to delete the secret administrator account...)

So, I'll just have to live without having the actual Guest account active (which I need active for use with Orbicule Undercover,) and instead I created a standard user (with a few parental controls) named "Guest User."

Thanks, both of you, for your help.

Reply

Answer 4

V.K.

Level 9

56,192 points

May 19, 2008 8:26 AM in response to gecko85

that will work but I would implement some clean up features in your "Guest User" account to reset the home directory on logouts the way normal guest account does. I don't know the mechanism used by normal guest accounts for this but you should look into that.

Reply

Answer 5

RodneyW

Level 4

3,041 points

May 19, 2008 3:52 PM in response to gecko85

No worries.

However, if the users have admin rights, won't they be able to see / identify / remove the "secret" admin account anyway? If they have minimal UNIX skills and a knowledge of sudo, they can go for it. Or, if they enable the root user.....

Reply

Answer 6

gecko85 Author

Level 1

9 points

May 20, 2008 8:02 AM in response to RodneyW

I moved the "secret" admin home folder to a "secret" location. 😉 Also, since that user doesn't show up in the Accounts section of System Preferences, they'd have to really know what they're doing to find that user. I'm confident none (or very, very few) have any knowledge of Unix whatsoever. We have only a small handful of power users, and they're all primarily Windows users...

Reply