programmatically login to OS X

Question

I am trying to create a program which will receive user credentials from a remote machine (where the user will be working), and forward these credentials to the login window of OS X. I know it can be done using AppleScript, but this is not always working as expected. In particular it is not working when the Mac is booted and no user has logged in yet. Is there another way to do this ?

Cheers
Alan J. Caruana

Answer 1

You'll need to write an authorization plugin . You can think of your task as something like using a smartcard reader to log in.

Answer 2

Can you use the existing Apple Remote Desktop solution ? This allows users to login directly to OS X from any machine that has a VNC client. And if you don't need a GUI connection, there's always ssh.