Mac setup for one Classroom

[Warwick_Tech]

Ok, Imagine you're talking to someone who used a mac once in college (Final Cut Pro making Zombie Movies, hey it's a living)

 

Also imagine you're now tasked with a new Music suite of 30 MACS and a handful of iPads and Macbooks on varying OS levels and specs.

 

Now also imagine this is real and I have no experience with MAC OS -

 

Is the server software free? Can I install it on a VM from Hyper-V? Does it Sync with AD?

 

Long story short - what's the best (read quickest and dirty) way of managing these devices centrally so they are locked down to a couple of Apps and we can create/wipe user profiles easily if they ever get lost/stolen

 

Any input welcome.

[DalekSec]

Cheapest way, spare Mac and install Mac Server on it, it is not free (can't remember price but it's under £100). You can run macOS from a VM but it's a legal gray spot and requires tinkering. I used it for all of 10mins and realised it didn't do what i wanted it to do and moved to a MDM.

 

Best way, invest in an MDM, you won't regret it. If you have money = JAMF, if you don't we use Mosyle its £5 per device per years which is cheap imo. Depending on the Macs you can run a cmd that your are able to DEP them and hence more restrictions on them.

 

You can AD join Macs using directory utility (comes installed on the macs). Join it to AD and you can sign in like normal with the AD users.

 

Very vague answer but if you have any questions feel free to PM me as i setup our mac suite here from scratch

[smadison]

Try looking at ZuluDesk as they have the annual license and the Perpetual license. It is easy to manage and it can be setup so that they log on with the network credentials https://www.zuludesk.com/pricing/

[dhicks]

Is the server software free? Can I install it on a VM from Hyper-V? Does it Sync with AD? Long story short - what's the best (read quickest and dirty) way of managing these devices centrally so they are locked down to a couple of Apps and we can create/wipe user profiles easily if they ever get lost/stolen

 

We use Zuludesk MDM - now owned by Jamf, but still around £5 per device per year. From a fresh install of Mac OS (this is rather easier than on a Windows PC - Mac OS will re-install from the Internet, and there's no licensing information to fiddle with), join the machine to the MDM and reboot. Zuludesk will handle joining the Mac to your Windows domain if you want. You have a choice of forcing local profiles (everything stored locally) or network (everything stored on the network - easy, nice that it includes Desktop and Documents folders, but might cause performance issues if your application data is on the network and your users start using something like iMovie). In the end, I went for local profiles with "Documents" being redirected to the user's mounted Google Drive - requires them to authorise access to Google Drive the first time they log on to a particular machine, but otherwise pretty fuss-free. I should be able to share the script if needed.

[geohanson]

We’re using Profile Manager in the Mac “Server” app on a Mac Mini to push out the preferences and settings to about 25 iMacs.

The iMacs are bound to AD (standard Windows Server AD/DNS/DHCP) and the Mac Server is only doing the equivalent of Group Policy. File shares are all Windows based as well.

Seems to work well enough but we’ve had issues in the past. I’ve just upgraded to 10.14 this summer so hopefully it’ll be a bit more stable now.

[Warwick_Tech]

Thanks for the replies all - I'll do some investigations and get back to you, most appreciated.

 

Regards,

[crof]

Check out this video from Apple might it help https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/303/