Mac noob, need a few pointers..

[mrbios]

So recently the head bought himself an iPad 2, he's in love with it, i've set him up to have his calenders syncing with the PA, he can use impero to spy on people during lessons and he's generally having a right old hoot.

Now we only have 2 macs in school, both running OSX 10.5 (leopard?) and he wants to use his iPad 2 to talk to one of them etc. So i'm currently in the process of wiping the thing and starting it again (it was originally setup by a 6th former and purchased by the library - we had nothing to do with them, weren't even connected to the network)

This has got me thinking about our media room, we have a dedicated section of 10 PCs for media, these are currently quad core phenoms. What would it take to integrate 10 macs purely for video editing connected to network storage? for example is there a mac equivilant to group policy? what management possibilities are there? do i need to do anything specific with storage or are they happy enough accessing mapped drives in the same way as windows?

Not sure what other question i had but those should get me a starting point

[SC92]

For those 10 macs you're looking at, you'd ideally need a mac server for it to be really effective. Then:

- Deploystudio for imaging
- Workgroup manager for managing preferences/group policy. You can do just about anything with this.
- ARD (Apple remote desktop) not that necessary but if you feel like spending..

It really is straight forward I just found that the hardest part was actually the 'getting to know' managing macs. Can't help you about the ipad though im afraid, got a funny feeling that we'll be getting some here soon for some reason...

[mrbios]

Awesome thanks If i remember rightly impero works on macs now so i should be ok on the remote desktop part. Might have to look into this a bit closer, see if i can persuade the head to throw some cash at it

How much does a basic 21.5" iMac purely for video editing cost schools these days? We generally get things a bit cheaper than average joe, going by the apple site it'd be £6-7k hoping it's a bit less through a 3rd party supplier?

[SC92]

Not sure on pricing as ours were bought a few weeks before I started here. We're on an RM CC4 network so I guess we got quite a large chunk taken off for going through RM.

Deploystudio is the basic 'take an image and roll it out' sort of software but really with a nice interface and is quite user friendly, gets the thumbs up from me and im not impressed easily! Apllies an image in four steps;

- Take a client off the domain
- Install software/updates or whatever you want changed with the image
- Take an image of the 'perfect' image
- It then stores the image on the mac server, which you can then roll out with deploystudio manually or create a workflow to do it for you. It even images our bootcamp partitions.

[mrbios]

Excellent, thanks for the info SC92

The librarian here just told me about a conversation she had with another school about macs, apparently they had an apple Representative in their school flogging mac stuff dirt cheap because they're trying to push more of it into schools, getting her to get me some more info on that, if i get anything worthwhile i'll pass it on

[SC92]

Excellent, thanks for the info SC92

No problem - very glad to help as when I first started here my first major job was to get our macs + server up and operational! Strange situation to be in but well-worthwhile.

if i get anything worthwhile i'll pass it on

Please do! Thanks.

[tommej]

Thoroughly recommend KRCS, for both supply and support.

[mrbios]

Thoroughly recommend KRCS, for both supply and support.

Hi tommej, are you able to give me any rough ideas on what various macs costs?

[GrumbleDook]

Hi tommej, are you able to give me any rough ideas on what various macs costs?

It will vary depending on what deals are about at the time, but if you go to the Apple UK Education store it will give you the general discounts ... but ASEs and AASPs will give you figures directly.

[HodgeHi]

It depends on what video editing software you are going to run really. You can get an educational model iMac. It's similar to an older 20" aluminium iMac with 2GB RAM and an integrated Graphics Card I think. But the overall price is around £650 -£700. This machine will run iMovie no problem. May be a little slow if you are doing some high-end video editing, or potentially a little slow at running Final Cut when rendering out the final video it may take a while. We don't run FCP so can't really say how well it performa on these machines.

We have 35 iMac Edu models and have no real problems running anything on them really. If there is any slow-down it's usually down to running stuff using networked accounts. Setting up 10 iMacs shouldn't pose any issues. Configuring them to access a network share should be relatively easy enough. You don't necessarily need to purchase a Mac server to manage these clients. You do have a bit of management by using the parental controls. However, using WGM along macs aids in the management of the mac clients. Just be aware that this works alongside a directory structure. You will either need an OS X Open Directory structure or an Active Directory Structure which has had it's schema extended to allow writing Apple MCX records to.

You can purchase 3rd party options to allow writing MCX data to an unextended AD schema but these can cost a fair bit, and with each OS X upgrade (10.5,10.6 etc) usually need to be upgraded to. So be aware of the additional cost when buying in to the 3rd party options.

[mrbios]

The 2 iMacs we have currently are 2.6ghz core 2 processors, both were obtained by the library via the means of those "computers for schools" things.

I remember final cut being mentioned as well as adobe premiere elements (hate that program!) These two macs are currently on leopard but for the tiny cost of £63 i'm tempted to upgrade them both to lion..... the reason i say £63 is for 1 copy of snow leopard and 2 copies of lion.....is this legal? As i'll only be using snow leopard as an upgrade path (as far as i can tell there's no upgrade path from 10.5 to 10.7)

Getting to grips with these two before i turn my focus to new ones for our media room Though the head did like the idea of macs in the art department and media room lol

Just added one to the network, i have two questions about a mac on AD with no mac server available.....
first off is there a way to change defaults for people logging in? Things like the desktop wallpaper for example?
The second is slightly more important, file shares! I can annoyingly see every share on our file server, including one that is read only to students but normally hidden, what do i need to do in order to only allow specific shares?

[HodgeHi]

The 2 iMacs we have currently are 2.6ghz core 2 processors, both were obtained by the library via the means of those "computers for schools" things.

These should run Lion but check the RAM. It does need a bit more than 1GB. 2GB i think is minimum. I have a 2ghz core 2 duo iMac running lion at home but it does have a dedicated graphics card with 128 RAM onboard.

I remember final cut being mentioned as well as adobe premiere elements (hate that program!)

Why do they need both?

These two macs are currently on leopard but for the tiny cost of £63 i'm tempted to upgrade them both to lion..... the reason i say £63 is for 1 copy of snow leopard and 2 copies of lion.....is this legal? As i'll only be using snow leopard as an upgrade path (as far as i can tell there's no upgrade path from 10.5 to 10.7)

For me there is a big grey area over the whole App store thing for OSes. IIRC Apple during their WWDC about Lion in the App Store said with one purchase you could run it on upto 10 client or however machines you own. Now this is for consumers. Not sure how it works for businesses and education establishments. There was a discussion on here a little while ago about volume purchasing of Lion. The Lion OS is also a full install as well as far as I can tell so in theory doesn't require an upgrade path. However, does it require 10.6 under the T&Cs? If so I'm not sure why as there is no alternative "full version" to purchase instead.

So what does one do? You can't get 10.6 anymore from resellers (i asked about 10.6 server) so how can you follow the upgrade path imposed by the T&Cs.

I would install from scratch on all machines using the volume purchase.

Getting to grips with these two before i turn my focus to new ones for our media room Though the head did like the idea of macs in the art department and media room lol

Just added one to the network, i have two questions about a mac on AD with no mac server available.....
first off is there a way to change defaults for people logging in? Things like the desktop wallpaper for example?
The second is slightly more important, file shares! I can annoyingly see every share on our file server, including one that is read only to students but normally hidden, what do i need to do in order to only allow specific shares?

You can create a template user and configure the preferences. Once done you can then log out of this user account and then copy their home dir over the default template on the client. Once this is done any accounts created and logged in after this would pick up the new 'default' template.

You can then lock down the user by using the parental controls.

This is perhaps a clunky way of managing macs but it is a free option. I'm not sure if the AD users are able to be locked down using parental controls though. It may just be local accounts. If indeed it is only local accounts, you will have to move to either extending the AD schema or investing in OS X Server. OS X Server can be installed on any mac that meets the requirements. It does not have to be a server-grade system. An educational iMac can run OS X Server if you wanted it to.

There is a video tutorial on how to extend the schema on Apples educational video site IIRC.

Here is the educational videos section on Apple's site:

http://www.apple.com/education/resources/

[jimmy38]

I know this has been covered many times before but can anyone point me to a step by step guide on getting students home directory mapped when students log on to the macs?

[SC92]

Hi Jimmy,

Do you have a mac server? If so, are you using Workgroup manager to manage your clients? I can help you out if you're using Workgroup manager but I don't know how to map it without it!

[jimmy38]

Yes we are using a mac server with workgroup manager installed and all macs are bound to the domain and in a group within Workgroup manager.