Centralised desktop wallpaper and Dock fix - Profile Manager / OS X Server / Yosemite

[slancaster]

Afternoon all,

hopefully this will solve a lot of your headaches and answer two common Mac questions.

 

Problem - Desktop wallpaper being centrally managed and dock showing question marks rather than network shares.

 

Remedy:

 

So, the problem with setting your desktop wallpaper on a networked Mac running Yosemite and above is that the network shared is mapped AFTER the preference kicks in to set the wallpaper. To fix this, I created the desktop.jpg and placed it in a network location which all users have read access to. I then created a automator script which takes an input (the full path of the desktop.jpg) and then sets the wallpaper. This script has a 2 second pause at the start to ensure it runs after network connections have occurred.

 

I made a local folder on the client mac named "Scripts", set the rights to everyone read only and put the automator app in there (ensure the automator app has read access for all network users or you may get an access denied icon displaying for other users).

 

Use profile manager to set a "launch at login" item to point at the script.

 

Ensure "desktop lock picture" is OFF to allow the script to set the wallpaper. This flag is set under "restrictions" within Profile manager.

 

Happy days.

 

The second common question is about having network shares on the dock. Again, network shares are connected AFTER the dock settings, so the dock doesn't know where to look and unfortunately doesn't connect to the network shares after clicking the question mark.

 

Same fix really, make an automator app to kill the dock after a 2 second pause. Add script to profile manager the same way as before.

 

screen shots and example automator files attached (note, the paths in the automator script obviously relate to my place of work - just change the paths to match you needs).

 

cheers

 

WallpaperAndDockAps.zip

[slancaster]

update - I've now moved the scripts to a network share which is a lot better.

Machine level network mounts seem to connect BEFORE the user shares, so on the top level Profile Manager group for my Macs I've set them to connect to a common network share at login.

 

Then on the USER GROUP login settings, I then say to launch the scripts, which now point at the network location rather than a local folder.