Help with Mac's and Windows

[wellscs]

Please does anyone have any information on what our Music Department would like to do?

Ware trying to get Macs here for music and music tech and we have been discussing various options in terms of how we set them up.

I'd like to find out what is possible for us relating to the school network.

What we would like is the machines to be stand alone, ie each running its own OS and software and not from a central server, but I know it is possible for macs on a network to mount network drives and read and write data like a normal drive, accessing it through the finder (my computer). If the kids could start working on a project on an iMac in 55 and be able to read and write to their network folder from that computer as well as write to the machines physical drive, then they could access that data from another iMac to continue working and also serve as a great backup solution.

Any audio recordings would be recorded directly to the machines physical drive, but things like sibelius and cubase projects that dont actually contain the audio just instructions that tell the software what to do with the audio could be saved to the network drive as well as backed up copies of audio that has been recorded.

Thanks

[3s-gtech]

Our Music dept has a suite of iMacs. They're added into the Active Directory, so the students use their normal log ons. The Macs pick up their home folders from the AD, so the students are saving to their regular home drives (Windows based server hosting these). They're then locked down with Open Directory on a Mac Mini Server, so they can't mess around too much. Seems to work well. For the local storage on the PC, you should be able to set that up on the individual Macs, but beware of filling the HDDs rather quickly with a multitude of students using the space!