Help\advice needed please

Hi All,
Whilst I have some experience with Macs, it is sadly lacking due to little exposure to them.
But we have two Mac suites in the Music dept.
Now the IT guy who was here before wanted nothing to do with them at all!!
So the Macs have been used as 'standalone' apart from having Internet access until now.
I want to change that. The Mac suites are getting a bit jaded. So the thouths are at the moment to make one suite a PC suite and revamp the Mac suite. This way the Kids can experience both platforms.
What I want to do is to integrate the macs into the school network so that the pupils can access their home folder and save work as and when needed.
Now one of the concerns was the amount of traffic that would\could be produced by the large wav files etc.
So my thought were to put a
Server (prob mac but not essental) in the Music Block and have the macs Authenticate to there and save the work there.
But then allow(via that server) access to the rest of the network (the pupils home dir,classworks foler etc and the Internet.
I am after suggestions,reccomendations, advice on the best way to do this.
I want to integrate the macs into the School AD so that the pupils have the same security and things are logged. At the mo the pupils often 'mess about' on the macs and a lot of time is spent onsetting things back to how they should be.
Work is saved on the local hard disk!!!!
So a pupil has to go back to the same Mac each time.
I don't want a 'them and us' situation and would much prefer to integrate in.
Also the Teachers have mac notebooks (thats fine) but at the mo they also have a pc laptop for SIMS. Can SIMS be run on a mac?
Licenses?
Thanks
Alan

Hi Alan,
I'm a Mac user most of the time, so I can try and give a little advice: first, the easy stuff:

SIMS does not run natively on a Mac. You can use Parallels or other emulation software to emulate windows and run it on that if you wish, but you'll need to have appropriate Windows licenses etc - that said, my MBP will run Win7 and EuroTruck simulator quite happily in Parallels.

As far as restrictions and setting home folders goes, go, you'll pretty much have to put in OSX Server, but if you've got decent network connections, you can buy a Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server on for around £800 less the VAT (remember to ask for the educational discount) and use that to setup LDAP authentication which should then let kids use the rest of the network fileshares.

Just my 2p.

Rob

I am in the same boat, although this is our first mac suite. I have bought a mac mini with OSx server on and will locate this in the same cabinet that the music suite runs back to.

Although i've not got that far yet, all iMacs are locked down using the guest account until i find the time to get the Mac server working as it should.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by robdaglish

Hi Alan,
I'm a Mac user most of the time, so I can try and give a little advice: first, the easy stuff:

SIMS does not run natively on a Mac. You can use Parallels or other emulation software to emulate windows and run it on that if you wish, but you'll need to have appropriate Windows licenses etc - that said, my MBP will run Win7 and EuroTruck simulator quite happily in Parallels.

As far as restrictions and setting home folders goes, go, you'll pretty much have to put in OSX Server, but if you've got decent network connections, you can buy a Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server on for around £800 less the VAT (remember to ask for the educational discount) and use that to setup LDAP authentication which should then let kids use the rest of the network fileshares.

Just my 2p.

Rob

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Thanks for that. I had a look at that server last night and wondered if it was 'big' enough for the job in hand.
We would need say 500gig user space. and be able to cope with up to 150 concurrent users.
I have no 'feel' for the capabilities of Mac servers as I have no experience of them.
Can that integrate into the domain?
Alan

There is no Mac-native SIMS client. You'll need to use Bootcamp or a virtual windows machine (with VMWare or Parallels) to get SIMS on the MacBooks.

Also, joining your Macs to your AD won't get you the same AD security... Securing Mac clients is a very different deal to Windows machines. If you're buying a server, you'll want to look at Workgroup Manager to set certain rules, restrictions and policies, but be aware they are nowhere near as granular as Windows group policies.

As for authentication and using the same logins, you'll struggle to do exactly what you want. You won't be able to get access to the rest of your Windows network 'via the server' (as in, the server forwards requests)... They'll need to be on the same network and be bound to your domain, as will your server.
Using your Apple server, you'll be able to supplement your AD login details with the missing bits that make Apple logins work, which should allow pupils to have the AD My Documents as their Apple Home Folders. Unless you've got network and storage capacity on your Windows network, you'll want to set up a shared area on your mac for the pupils to store large files to.

So in short, you need to join an apple server to your windows domain, and use that to supplement AD data with OpenDirectory data (Apple's equivalent) to allow your accounts to log in to macs.

Sorry for the hasty (and probably confusing) reply... Hope it points you in the right direction at least a little bit!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by abullett

There is no Mac-native SIMS client. You'll need to use Bootcamp or a virtual windows machine (with VMWare or Parallels) to get SIMS on the MacBooks.

Also, joining your Macs to your AD won't get you the same AD security... Securing Mac clients is a very different deal to Windows machines. If you're buying a server, you'll want to look at Workgroup Manager to set certain rules, restrictions and policies, but be aware they are nowhere near as granular as Windows group policies.

As for authentication and using the same logins, you'll struggle to do exactly what you want. You won't be able to get access to the rest of your Windows network 'via the server' (as in, the server forwards requests)... They'll need to be on the same network and be bound to your domain, as will your server.
Using your Apple server, you'll be able to supplement your AD login details with the missing bits that make Apple logins work, which should allow pupils to have the AD My Documents as their Apple Home Folders. Unless you've got network and storage capacity on your Windows network, you'll want to set up a shared area on your mac for the pupils to store large files to.

So in short, you need to join an apple server to your windows domain, and use that to supplement AD data with OpenDirectory data (Apple's equivalent) to allow your accounts to log in to macs.

Sorry for the hasty (and probably confusing) reply... Hope it points you in the right direction at least a little bit!

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Thanks for that. Kind of what I thought.
So any suggestions for the server (spec,price etc).
The SIMS part I suspected that I would need to vm it (good job I use VMware a lot lol).
Yes I want the pupils to store their big music files locally (in the music block) on a server (each pupils home dir?), but then allow them access to the rest of the network as they would have in the rest of the school.
So its technically possible to do what I want to do (good start!).
Price and spec of kit next. Any one want to offer some suggestions?
Alan

Hmm. Perhaps I should have made that clearer Alan - I was proposing LDAP integration for user accounts, and file storage on your existing servers, not the new mac server, which I'd envisioned as being there only to let you do the restrictions - basically, Snow Leopard Server has three main components as far as networking is concerned - Workgroup Manager, which despite the name is the bit that lets you setup domains and is the only one I can remember (it was christmas when I last setup a Mac network), a security profile manager which broadly does the job of Group Policy Manager, and a third one which I think is server manager which lets you configure the services running on your server, eg SQL, IMAP, POP etc, which you tend not to use once you've got everything running properly!

That said, you could quite easily setup a Time Capsule if you wanted to go all Mac, or some other sort of NAS box to store the files on which would give you more space?

The alternative, and what I'd suggest for 150 concurrent users (how big is your music department?) would be to buy a great big Mac Pro and a separate copy of SLS, and stack it with oodles of disk space.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by abullett

There is no Mac-native SIMS client. You'll need to use Bootcamp or a virtual windows machine (with VMWare or Parallels) to get SIMS on the MacBooks.

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Or Virtualbox? It's free!