Macs with Mac Server on Windows Domain with AD Authentication

[J_Worth]

Hello everyone,

 

Our performing arts department are looking at getting some iMacs for music production. They are also looking at getting a Mac server to help manage these clients. My question is - is it possible to integrate the Mac server onto a Windows Active Directory domain?

 

Further, The idea would be that students save their music files onto the Mac server but user authentication is done via Active Directory. Once they log on, they have a drive mounted on their desktop which is their personal share on the Mac server. The Mac server should also configure proxy settings on the Mac as well as other things.

 

Is this possible?

 

Hopefully, what I have written above makes sense - I've never really used Macs before, let alone in a mixed network environment.

 

Thanks in advance for your help/advice.

 

J.Worth.

[robjduk]

what you ask is possible and the good news is, it is not all that hard.

 

Macs nowadays seem to be built to integrate with AD so you end up with your users authenticating onto the iMac with AD and then local settings are handled by the mac server.

As for network shares, personally I have mine redirect to their windows network share (with a quota) and then mount a shared drive which is just on the mac server but I am 99% sure a little tweaking on the server will map a home directory to the server of your choice. I think the only thing I would struggle on is the proxy settings as there is a space to control client settings but not sure you can add a proxy on to that but no doubt a better man than I can help you with that.

 

The one golden rule with putting macs in the building...... soon as it us up, open the app store and get remote desktop. Installing software from this is a thing on beauty that every network manager who has dicked about with a stubborn msi should witness.

[J_Worth]

That is very good to know. Would be good to get the Proxy settings set on the server so that they are used by all of the Mac clients no matter what user logs on to them. I assume you can have two different proxies depending on the user that logs on? i.e. A different proxy port for staff.

[Achandler]

Although I have only a little experience with mac servers (only started using them in the last month) I can confirm that you can indeed set the proxy and have a different setting for different AD groups through the xserve/ mac server.

[robjduk]

also to add, bottom line is macs have a very nice auto script making package built in. You can command what you want to happen and it makes a script for you to run on startup. A year ago I was in your exact same position and have found there are a lot of plus points to mac ownership but just don't believe that "it just works" thing. Yes it does a lot of the time but when it decides to, things go down bigtime.

[Bud180]

You can configure the proxy settings via a configuration profile under the profile manager role on the OSX Server. Easy peasy too.

[robjduk]

does the proxy thing work for networked connections too? I tried that but to me it seemed it was wireless configuration only... then we didn't have a proxy anymore so i gave up worrying.

[Bud180]

There is the option in Pm for a global HTTP Proxy which works on both Ethernet and wifi.