[kashchei]

I am teaching a computer music course, and two of the students in the class require the grade of an incomplete (one student's mother fell ill and required round-the-clock supervision; the other student required surgery for the removal of a tumor). They created their own accounts at the beginning of the semester, and I need to put some files in their documents folder for them to complete their missing assignments. They are both out of town and will not be back on campus before the end of the semester. Is there a way to gain access to their accounts without their passwords (both have ignored my requests for this information)? I thought of trying to log in as the root user, except after reading the help file on this topic, I was confused. It says to enable the root user, log out, and then choose "other" in the login window. I don't see this option on the login screen, only the list of accounts. BTW, the computers in the lab are still running Panther. Any help with this problem will be greatly appreciated.

[drmbb]

Here's one way to do it. Open terminal and open finder. In terminal type (BUT do not hit return/enter until the very end):
sudo cp <space>
now, in the finder window, click on the file you need to copy and drag-n-drop it over terminal. That will put the full path to the file in the command line. Type a space, and then, in Finder, click on Users, click on the student's home folder, then click on Documents and drag-n-drop it over terminal. That will put the path to the students Documents folder in the command line. Now finish by typing:
/.
at the end of the command line (so it ends like this ".../Documents/." no space between the "s" and the "/"), and hit the return key. You'll be prompted for your admin password, and the files will be copied (ie. cp) to the students Documents directory under the same name they original have (ie. that's what the "/." does).
so your final command would look like:
sudo cp /path/to/file /Users/studentid/Documents/.
Note you do not need root enabled in NetInfo - I've never done that on my machines. The use of sudo (even "sudo su -" if you want a root shell session), and some command line knowledge combined with Finder's interface with terminal will take care of little tasks like this.
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[d00d]

Another option is to drop the files into a publicly accessible folder, like Shared or dropping the files into their dropbox and letting them manually move them.