Integrating Macs into a Windows network.

[Koldov]

Wait... What?

 

I need to change the permissions on the root to allow the Mac to see a folder within it?

 

Joy...

 

What did you allow?

 

Read & execute

 

List folder contents

 

Read

 

Any or all of the above?

 

Do you have a way of putting other shared drives on the desktop or somewhere easily accessible??

 

I can open them in Finder, but can't see a way to save that access...

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Kol

[3s-gtech]

Just read, and just for the root. It's a bit mad, but it's not a security issue. Just make sure it doesn't propagate to all of the sub folders (inheritance needs to be off).

 

Using Profile Manager, we mount student shares. Profile Manager | Login Items | Network Mounts | authenticated network mounts.

[aarongulley]

Hi All,

 

 

 

Out of the blue without any consultation with myself (obviously), I receive an email from a supplier quoting for a shiny new MacBook Pro for my Headteacher... I guess it will arrive and be presented to me with a demand to attach it to the network somehow.

 

 

However, I don't really know anything about Apple infrastructure or how far it can integrate with a Windows network. Could anybody give me a quick 101 on what I can expect it to be able to do/not do in regards to server access, AD, GPO's, printing (bearing in mind we do not have airprint enabled printers), shares, possibly SIMS/DISCOVER....

 

Anything else I might need to watch out for/heads up/gotchas....

 

Kol.

 

You can control a macbook with GPOs etc but you do need tools on your DC such as ADmitMac | Thursby Software or centrify, but it's probably best practice to get a mac mini server and use profile manager, you can still bind to AD for user login and map network drives.

[dhicks]

Trouble is I can't see how it connects to his home drive - I selected 'Use UNC path from Active Directory ....for home location' - but it shows up on login that he can't connect to the server, with a question mark in the 'dock' for it. It also shows up as smb://SERVER/ROOTOFSHARE/ in the login items, but not his folder and he doesn't have permissions on the root obviously...

 

On our new iMacs running Mac OS El Capitan, we joined each one to Active Directory via System Preferences -> Users & Groups. This then made each user's network home folder available under /Volumes/home when they logged in. To match up their Desktop and Documents folders to their network versions we simply replaced each user's /Users/username/Desktop and Users/username/Documents folders with soft links to the mounted network versions, i.e.

 

ln -s /Volumes/home/j.bloggs/Desktop /Users/j.bloggs/Desktop

ln -s /Volumes/home/j.bloggs/Documents /Users/j.bloggs/Documents

 

You need to be root to do this. On a machine used by one person just doing it manually should be fine, but I wrote a script instead that runs on startup / login.

[Koldov]

Well, I'm going with setting up a security group and add him to it, then will give that group the read access to the folder root. Thanks for the inheritance tip @3s-gtech - unfortunately it is on, so will have to go through all the staff folders and manually turn it off...

 

As for showing shared drives/mapping I found the below in an apple forum if anybody else comes across this thread:

 

There's an option in the Finder Preferences. "Show these items on the Desktop: Connected Servers"

 

Just make sure it's checked.

 

Click on "Go", then "Connect to Server", then enter the server/folder path like so: smb://server/folder. Enter your username and password, if prompted.

 

A new icon will then be placed on your desktop and in the finder, under "Shared".

 

Seems simple enough!

 

Kol

[Koldov]

Or would this work?

 

icacls q:\parent\*.* /inheritence:d

[3s-gtech]

icacls q:\parent\*.* /inheritance:d (the Experts Exchange post has a typo!)

 

Yes that works, I just used it today to refresh our folders with the new year 7 and 13s going in.

[Koldov]

[Koldov]

Ok, so finally got it all finished and ready yesterday afternoon...

 

Joined to AD, printing with print accounting, shared drives, home drive, Microsoft Office on the dock (because the applications folder is hard to find).

 

Now I type it out, it doesn't seem a lot and yet it took me 2 days (in between my other work of course) and that was only with a hefty dose of Google and Edugeek! But as I'm not an Apple fan-boy and have never used a Mac I guess it's not so bad (it even took me quite a while to work out how to drag something and I still don't have the hang of it).

 

Anyway, pop my head in this morning all chuffed to see how he's getting on....

 

Er, yes ok... Just one question.... How do I get on SIMS?

 

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!

 

FML

 

I feel this is headed BTRD...

[3s-gtech]

Probably the same way we do it - RDP. If that's not good enough for them, tough - they should have considered it beforehand!

[mavhc]

Buy PC, install Windows, change icons to look like Mac, put Apple sticker on the lid, done.

[2ilent8cho]

 

Er, yes ok... Just one question.... How do I get on SIMS?

 

 

Wait for Capita to join the modern world and have SIMS 8 ready, instead of living in 1995, use RDP, get a fancy RDP system like Citrix or Parallels 2x, or use a VM. We went the Paralles 2x route for our 80 staff Macbooks, but a bit over kill for just 1 person. So guessing RDP is going to be the cheapest and cleanest route. The Mac RDP clients is nice, just do a 3 finger swipe left and right to jump between Mac and the RDP session.

[Koldov]

Hmmmmm... seems our SLT knows an 'expert' and has been told I need to:

 

Upgrade the memory in the Mac

 

Buy VMware Fusion 8

 

Install Windows and then install SIMS (hoping I've set it up so SOLUS can even see it).

 

Ah well, good job I've got nothing better to do in the school than pander to an Apple fan...

[mavhc]

Make sure you break out Mac costs (hardware, software and support time), and divide by number of users, in your budget report

[Koldov]

Any body using this or similar know if it is officially supported?

[3s-gtech]

Can you upgrade the RAM in your Mac? It's been soldered in on many new models for several/a couple of years now (depending on model).

 

Putting Windows on the Mac, even via Fusion, seems head-bangingly stupid to me. If it's just going to be used to run Windows, what's the point? I never even saw the appeal of dual booting in the days of Bootcamp (at least in schools).

[Brimstone]

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH21988?locale=en_GB

 

Every time something's weird on the Mac just go "weird, works fine on Windows"

 

And log how much time you spend supporting that one computer out of x, put that in your report:

Time spent supporting Windows computers 600 hours

Time spent supporting Mac computers 10 hours

Time spent on Windows computers per computer 5 hours

Time spent on Mac computers per computer 10 hours

 

Draw a nice graph, maybe multiply it by your hourly wages.

 

 

IBM would strongly disagree with your point of view....

 

?Every Mac we buy is making and saving IBM money? - IBM | Computerworld

[pantscat]

That's comparing Apples with oranges (pun intended).

 

Macs can make a lot of sense in a business environment, assuming the higher initial capital investment isn't off-putting.

If you just have the requirement for portable devices with good battery life and a very small software footprint (maybe Office and a few other apps) - then Mac management is pretty straightforward and yes, I can believe that the TCO in these circumstances is probably pretty good.

 

Blah blah blah, school environment, blah blah blah, SIMS, blah blah blah, weird and wonderful software. etc.

[mavhc]

Start from scratch, hire 24 new people to support Macs, easy.

 

If they did that with Windows or Linux it would probably work the same way

[Koldov]

Can you upgrade the RAM in your Mac? It's been soldered in on many new models for several/a couple of years now (depending on model).

 

Not entirely sure....

 

A quick 'About this Mac' revealed 8GB, so I left it at that - guessing it's enough.

 

Tech specs say this:

 

Memory

◾8GB of 1866MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory

Configurable to 16GB.

 

What 'configurable' means, well your guess is probably better than mine...

[Koldov]

So all those using Parallels, WMware or something similar...

 

Is this Capita supported if I can't get it to work, or shall I presume I'll be back here fairly soon?

[3s-gtech]

Recent Macbook Pro then? Configurable just means at time of purchase. It's soldered in. 8GB will be plenty for a good while yet though, but perhaps you could use that to show that your 'expert' probably only has half a clue.

[Koldov]

Recent Macbook Pro then?

 

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015)

 

That's a grand that good have gone to better use elsewhere, plus extras for VM now, plus my time and effort... When he had a decent Lenovo Thinkpad T410 (CPU core i7 - 6 GB RAM - SSD) already configured and working...

 

Hmmm, on the other hand this WILL probably look good on my resume! I did wonder when my CPD was going to happen...

 

Seems like I'm getting more and more reasons to get that resume up to date these days!

Edited September 15, 2016 by Koldov

[3s-gtech]

Having experience of working with (and fixing!) Macs and their quirks is very valuable. Despite the hours of my life drained by fixing stupid issues on them, the kids have benefitted from having them and the hardware is very nice and durable. The low cost of Logic Pro 9 was one of the best positives.